Still Late After All These Years!

With Conan O'Brien booted off of the Tonight Show and Jay Leno on his way back to 11:30, it seemed like an appropriate time to take a look at HBO's 1996 movie The Late Shift, which takes a look at the first time NBC decided to royally screw the late night pooch.

You see, back in 1991 the perception by some was that Johnny Carson was getting increasingly irrelevant. Ratings were slipping a bit and the brass at NBC were starting to worry about the future of their enormously successful late night block. Something had to be done. NBC, of course, got greedy and in an attempt to keep ahold of a "hot new talent" (Leno) and a proven talent they'd put ten years into grooming (Letterman) they wound up allowing themselves to be bullied in one of the epic clusterfucks of the 20th century.

We all know how it ended, so you'd think The Late Shift would be all about the whos, hows and whys. What we really get (aside from parade of forgettable,spineless executives)is a scapegoat in the form of Jay Leno's agent, Helen Kushnick (played here by Kathy Bates). Bates won a Golden Globe for her performance, but it's painfully obvious that she's simply phoning in (on a giant 90s car phone) a stock, fat 'n' sassy performance amped up to 10 on the retarded scale. Seriously, in the scene where she goes apeshit and knocks everything off her desk... it's just shockingly bad. Even more shocking is to think about what we used to accept as quality programming even as recently as 1996. This is HBO! The folks that gave us Oz, Sex and the City and The Sopranos. This crap makes Arli$$ look like friggin' Schindler's List. But I digress.

A lot of folks give props to John Michael Higgins' portrayal of David Letterman, and he deserves it. What begins as a pretty decent impression slowly becomes a fully developed character as we begin to glimpse the paranoia and distrust at the core of Letterman's character. Poor Daniel Roebuck, on the other hand, must have drawn the short straw.

Roebuck seemes like a genuinely nice guy, but anyone tasked with pulling off that lithpy, lilting Jay Leno voice is destined to look like a fool. And I haven't even mentioned the Leno make-up yet. Yup, they go for the full-on false chin. In fact, the jowl and chin prosthetic is so ridiculous that he looked more like Rocky Dennis than Jay Leno. And stuuupid? Do they play Leno stupid? He is waaay in the dark about everything going on around him. Of course, it's supposed to make him sympathetic, but he comes off as an inept manchild. He will hold onto his late night show. He will love it and pet it and call it George! Pathetic.

The Late Shift is a neat little curio of the early 90s late night wars, but beyond that it has little to offer. But I am psyched for the next two entries into what will surely be a trilogy of Jay Leno sticking it to other, more talented television hosts. Conan's royal screwing in 2010 will be the Empire Strikes Back of the series, while Jimmy Fallon's inevitable shafting in 2027 will bring it all to a close.

Or will it?