Con Trail

It’s been a few months since I saw a live taping of the the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Watching his show on TV compared to seeing it live is like watching a major league pitcher throw a fastball on television compared to actually standing at the plate and watching it coming at you at ninety miles an hour. I’ll explain later.

I’ve been reading some news regarding Jay Leno’s move to 10pm, leaving his successful 11:30pm slot on the Tonight Show to supposedly try to “save” NBC’s primetime lineup. Now Conan O’Brien is the new Tonight Show host, but supposedly has been slowly losing his audience to David Letterman’s show on CBS. There are rumors that say if Conan’s ratings don’t get better, he will be replaced in a year with another host.

I’ve been watching these talk shows for as long as I can remember, and I haven’t noticed a dip in quality with any of them. As far as I’m concerned, all the shows are/were pretty damn good and they never really had to change anything. But the only thing that counts in show business are the ratings and advertising revenue, and the 18-49 year-old demographic, it seems.

Meanwhile, Craig Ferguson is still at his 12:30am time slot on CBS, right after Letterman. Unlike the other talk show hosts, Ferguson doesn’t have a band or a big budget. He sometimes calls his studio a garage. I’ve been there, and he’s right.

(This is the awkward segue where I talk about the live taping that felt like a fastball.)

His studio is claustrophobic, and even though there’s a lot of waiting involved, it feels frenetic. We as the audience spent at least an hour waiting for the actual show to start, while a warm-up comedian mingled with the audience and taught us how and when to clap, what not to do, when and how long to cheer as loudly as possible. We were given false cues as to when “it’s showtime”, but then had to wait 15 minutes, 30 minutes, salivatingly, while things got set up. Before Ferguson came out, we listened to a band that we’d never heard before, then cheered like maniacs when they finished, then we watched a stand-up comic do her routine, and cheered again like maniacs when she finished, because we’d been taught to do so.

When Ferguson finally appears and does his opening monologue, you can’t see his face because he stands so close to the camera that the lens cover and teleprompter hood shields him from audience view. The only way to see him is by watching the overhead monitors, which is the same view you would get if you were to stay at home and watch it on TV.

By the end of the event, I found myself in a semi-brainwashed state, ready to laugh and cheer on command. Don’t know if it was the same for Kristie, but we both agreed that we were exhausted, our hands throbbing from all the clapping, our voices gone from all the screaming. We agreed that we probably wouldn’t be doing this again.

I’m glad I taped the show that I saw live, because when I was actually there, it felt as if I didn’t really watch it. It was three hours of sitting, waiting, practicing, anticipating, frantically cheering, clapping, being supporting characters to this production that would be seen around the world very differently compared to how it was originally created. It was similar to waiting in line for five hours to see a Star Wars movie when I was a kid. It felt like work.

(Nonexistent segue from the crazy fastball analogy.)

Craig Ferguson is one of the more truthful ones out there. He admits when his show is crap, he owns up to his own blunders, and he tries nightly to reveal as much of show business reality as he can without getting in permanent trouble with CBS.

And yet, the reality of his show is still very different from the edited piece that shows up on TV at 12:30 in the morning. I have a feeling that the other talk shows, in terms of this disconnect, are worse. The other shows have bigger budgets and more pressure to sell advertising space. They have more writers, more stagehands, more technicians, more everything. So much more, simply to fill an hour of television with laughter. Actually, there’s nothing simple about it.

Something Ferguson said in a recent interview:

“I don’t want to be rich enough where all I’m worrying about is keeping my job.”

I wonder what Conan and Leno and Letterman are worried about.

(By the way, I titled this “Con Trail” hoping to talk about Craig Ferguson’s newly acquired pilot’s license, then comparing the kind of plane he flies, which is probably a prop-driven two- or four-seater, to the jets that other bigger celebrities fly or get flown in. I wanted to mention the condensation trail that a jet leaves in its wake, and how the contrail doesn’t really do anything except show you where the jet has already been, and how both propeller planes and jets basically do the same thing, which is fly. But I couldn’t figure out how to add all this stuff in, so I’m mentioning it here.)