Max Kay guest post: Late night TV update

Today is a special day on Madgespace. For the first time in the blog's seven year history, I'm featuring a guest post. It's from none other than Max Kay, my brother and fellow member of M&M (our a cappella whistling band).

Today's contributor, Max Kay. You can follow him on Twitter at @kay_max.

Without further ado...

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As a belated birthday present to my baby sis, I offered to write a guest post to help ease the burden of her Every Day For a Year streak. Think of it like a sitcom that offers a new episode only for it to be a clip show – it is still technically a new episode! Hopefully this will be slightly less disappointing than that.

When trying to come up with a pop culture subject with plenty of links to match the vibe of this space, I started thinking about how I got into late night talk show TV in college. Like millions who have come before and after me, by sophomore year I had learned to carefully arrange my class schedule to be as late in the day as possible. My friends and I stayed up to hang out and do not much of anything, and that involved watching hundreds of hours of Letterman and even Craig Kilborn, who we thought was the new face of comedy (we were dumb). 

After I got a job that involved mornings (and Kilby fell off the face of the earth), I rarely watched any of the late night shows.  Years went by and the comedy scene evolved.. sort of. We got the rise of Stewart and Colbert and the fake news format, groundbreaking shows from Chappelle and Louis CK, a new golden age of SNL, and we could watch pretty much anything else on YouTube. But the late night guys – Leno, Letterman, Kimmel, Conan, Ferguson – remained in the same format that had been invented before Johnny Carson over 50 years ago. 

On the rare times when I did tune in, this always struck me as strange. Entertainment is always evolving to stay current and get ratings, and while networks continuously copy each other’s stuff they are at least changing formats every few years (see: rise of singing competitions, kitchen showdowns, CSI-type detective shows, and on and on). Late night talk shows have been the one constant – like baseball and saltine crackers, we can count on them to be what they have always been: curtain, monologue of seven jokes, introduce the band, desk, commercial, guest, commercial, musical guest, see you tomorrow night! It is basically the same show our grandparents watched.

So I was intrigued when I heard that Fallon’s 'Tonight Show' was bringing in more music elements in an effort to shake things up. Apparently it has been wildly successful, with the show pulling in almost as many viewers as Kimmel and Letterman combined. At the same time, 'Tonight' has smartly packaged many of its best segments to be re-watched on YouTube so millions more of us can catch the best bits. 

My favorite of these are the Lip Sync Battles. Supposedly conceived by Stephen Merchant, John Krasinski and Emily Blunt, a Lip Sync Battle is a goofy competition where three people, in this case two guests plus Fallon, each lip sync two songs and we find out who is the best.  

Why does this format work?  A) lip syncing is funny, and b) some celebrities are really good at it.  

Check out my favorite battle, which is Merchant + Fallon + Joseph Gordon Levitt (supposedly the first to be done on the show). 

Great things about it:

1.       Merchant coming out of nowhere. This originally aired in 2013 when most of us thought of him as a talented and witty guy that would always be in the shadow of Ricky Gervais. Writer, stand up, sitcom guy sure, but stage/dance?? He steps out and crushes his first number (to the point that Fallon seems genuinely surprised) and then beats it with his second number. 

2.       Fallon as host/performer. Fallon has to introduce/welcome both guys, perform himself (which he does well, just not as well as the other guys) and work the crowd all at once. Hard to think of anyone else who could pull this off.

3.       Levitt is absolutely amazing. Merchant is so good that you think he has to win, but Levitt shows he has another level in him as a performer. No wonder SNL loves him as a host. How can someone actually be great at something so dumb as lip syncing? 

This was over a year ago, and Fallon has done a few more since, like the latest with Gwen Stefani and Blake Shelton. And there’s other good musical stuff, like sing-alongs with the Roots and the iPad app thing.  

To all of it I say kudos for getting guests to do something different that is live, funny, well-performed and entertaining.  Best of all, you don’t even need to stay up late to see it.

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Wonderful! Thanks for the update, Max. I loved hearing about the late night gatherings in the dorm, around what I presume was a huge square TV with a curved screen and an ass the size of Coco. 

The TV Max and his dorm buddies watched Kilborn on. Look at the booty on that thing!

Photo by High Contrast via Wikimedia Commons

Cheers, 
Margaret

P.S. Yes, JGL is a pretty good lip syncer. But nothing compares to Dida Ritz lip syncing for her life in front of Ms. Natalie Cole herself on RuPaul's Drag Race.

P.P.S. In the UK, they call lip syncing "miming".