Mar 03 2009
Late Night With Jimmy Fallon — The UnTalk Show
Tonight marked the first episode of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. Jimmy Fallon’s first guests were Robert DeNiro, Justin Timberlake, and Van Morrison. For a first episode, there wasn’t a lot of bang, even with the big names. The monologue was okay, the audience game was kind of lame (though I’ve never been big into talk show games anyway), and the sketches seemed like they’d been made up the night before. It was the equivalent of the Wayne’s World Cable Access show–you could easily picture Jimmy Fallon as a hyped-up teenager, snickering and fidgeting as he attempted to get longer-than-one-word answers from Robert DeNiro.
DeNiro was a good sport, and they played up the whole famous-for-not-talking-during-interviews bit, but the feigned awkwardness turned into actual awkwardness when Fallon attempted to ask real questions about the Tribeca Film Festival. I did get a laugh out of the train graphics in the DeNiro/Fallon sketch, but it seems like over all they could have come up with something a little more clever for a first show.
(IE users may need to *go here* for the video.)
Justin Timberlake proved to be the highlight of the show, doing impressions of John Mayer and Michael McDonald, and reprising his BeeGees role with Fallon as they sang along with the house band, The Roots. Here’s a clip of some of Justin’s hilarious roles on Saturday Night Live:
(IE users may need to *go here * for the video.)
As expected, Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake had good improv rapport, and the show got a bit smoother during his segment. When Fallon’s in his comfort zone–which is basic zaniness and riffing with other comedians–he’s a lot of fun. While some of the interviews could continue to be awkward, there’s a chance that Fallon’s unorthodox style could bloom into something exciting. Getting other actors and comdedians to go off on tangents and burst into song and do sketches holds a lot of promise for entertaining unpredictability–and is a good way to keep the audience on their toes and awake when you’re on in the late night time slot.
Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is pretty raw right now…but hopefully it will turn into raw-in-a-fun-way in future episodes.
Watch Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on NBC, weeknights at 12:30am Eastern/11:30pm Central.
I do think it was an odd choice to choose Fallon as a host of a talk show–I’d written in a previous post that he could hardly handle being a *guest* on a show, let alone actually running the interview. The dude is not big on social skills.
I agree that he did seem to want to play up his SNL comfort zone, which is fine to get you going, but he can’t keep falling back on that. He’s too young to be merely reliving his “glory days”–it’s time to go in a new direction.
I still do not understand the choice of having the most difficult guy to interview in the world as Fallon’s first guest. I think Timberlake was a late addition to the show and that was a wise move because he saved the show!
Lots of people thought Conan sucked (myself included) when he was first on the air. He almost lost the gig himself, the reviews were so bad. Then he hit his stride and was uniquely quirky and hilarious. Personally I think he needed a change now, too, and I’m hoping he’ll try out some different stuff on his new gig as well.