The Late Night Commodity: The Integration of New Media in Late Night Talk Shows. May 2011

The Late Night Commodity: The Integration of New Media in Late Night Talk Shows

Before taking over NBC’s Late Night franchise from Conan O’Brien in 2009, new host Jimmy Fallon began posting 5-10 minute comedy shorts online at 12:30 each night. In conceptualizing the program, producer Lorne Michaels’ idea “was to go back to late night's roots – an experimental comedy show for a different generation,” writes Bill Carter in his book The War for Late Night. “The target would be the college crowd that had anointed first Letterman and then Conan. Now of course because that group had infinitely more diversions for its time, most of them tech based, a new young host would have to be adaptable to the tech world” (169).

Despite being marketed by NBC as a new breed of late night host, Fallon’s show hardly deviates from the late night format established half a century ago. Packaging Late Night with Jimmy Fallon as a modern and progressive take on a longstanding television format is an example of network television attempting to capitalize on the new media landscape without significantly compromising any of their old media values, attitudes, or business strategies. Interestingly, in some ways Fallon’s predecessor, late night purist Conan O’Brien, represents the most progressive take on the late night talk show. That Fallon’s program incorporates technology into its narrative or is watched by a young, Internet-centric generation is not symptomatic of network television embracing new media and its participatory nature. Rather, with its emphasis on product placement and production of content specifically to be distributed online, Late Night with Jimmy Fallon stands as an interesting example of how television success is defined in what is often referred to as the “post-television era”.

In The Business of New Media, John Caldwell asserts that “content development based on a project’s potential for reiteration across platforms is as crucial today as initial air dates were in electronic media’s analogue era” (65). The late night talk show formula – which “always start[s] with the monologue -- Johnny Carson made it a national pastime -- then come[s] the behind-the-desk interviews, followed by the occasional stunt or impersonation” – is one that Fallon sticks to rigidly (Lowry). But with its high-production shorts easily shared on the Internet, fragmented variety format and the host’s youthful, comedy-geek approach, Fallon’s show is able to market itself as a 21st century product for a 21st century audience.

A recurring bit called Late Night Hashtags enables a handful of viewers to see their tweets on television; official show website latenightwithjimmyfallon.com provides fans with opportunities to play games and shop. The modern and democratized illusion offered by Fallon through products like his popular smartphone application and active web presence is emblematic of the way large media companies are becoming “more adept at monitoring and serving audience interests” and have learned ways to effectively “exploit the intense feelings” of consumers’ attachment “through the marketing of ancillary goods from t-shirts to games with promises of enabling a deeper level of involvement with the program content” (Jenkins, 165). “Mr. Fallon has already dived into the Web,” wrote The New York Times on the eve of his show’s official premiere, “he is the first late-night host to start a video blog… running snippets of comedy bits and background reports on how he was building the show [and] has been courting fans through Facebook and Twitter” (2009). The same communication technologies that enable interactivity and participation “are wielded to foster the entrenchment and growth of a global corporate media system that can be said to be anything but transparent, interactive or participatory” (Deuze). Closer examination of Jimmy Fallon reveals the extent to which his persona and content are mediated and controlled by NBC and other corporate interests.

Fallon, who has said his show “treats a video game premiere almost like a movie premiere,” is often recruited by large companies to hawk their new gaming systems and gadgets (geeksugar.com). And while it is hard to imagine any of his late night peers establishing a “Video Game Week” -- in which each night a new game is debuted on the program -- the incorporation of these products into the show’s narrative is less illustrative of Fallon’s innovative style and more an example of how “play has been increasingly colonized by the culture industries well beyond childhood in recognition of its heightened importance in the formation of the audience’s pleasures at the beginning of the new millennium” (Marshall, 69). An Examiner article titled “Is Jimmy Fallon becoming the new face of video games?,” asserts that Fallon’s intertextuality (“the process of cultural knowledge that flows back and forth between the audience and the individual text as the audience member injects other sources into the text”) makes him believable as a genuine consumer of gaming technologies (Marshall, 70).

Yet just as Fallon’s seemingly independent and subversive comedy shorts are actually mediated by the self-interest and financial concerns of the network producing them, the integration of gadgets and games into Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is evidence of what P. David Marshall calls the commodification of play (70). Similar to the ways in which the emergence of internet content has destabilized the traditional linear business model of the culture industries, “games have challenged the hegemony of narrative forms such as television and film and television as the dominant entertainment modes for adults in contemporary culture,” (Marshall, 71). According to Marshall, if the contemporary cultural industries can keep the audience, viewer or player within the system of entertainment choices, then they are “effectively maintaining their market;” a notion exemplified by the mutual embrace of network television and games depicted on Fallon’s show (74).

While Fallon’s love of technology and ancillary bundles of content may seem forward-thinking, they are in reality manifestations of old media corporations, “defined historically by the entertainment experience of the screen, the narrative, the star and the genre” now “liv[ing] to calculate, amass, repackage, and transport entertainment product across the borders of both new media technologies and forms” (Caldwell, 63). These “attempts to link consumers directly into the production and marketing of media content,” explains Jenkins, “are variously described as 'permission-based marketing,' 'relationship marketing' or 'viral-marketing'” and are increasingly promoted as the model for how to sell goods, cultural and otherwise, in an interactive environment (165).

NBC’s simultaneous resistance to and adoption of new media in its late night content is further complicated by the controversy and commotion that has surrounded the Tonight Show and Late Night franchises in the last several years. In The War for Late Night: When Leno went Early and Television went Crazy, Bill Carter explores the 2009 debacle in which NBC, less than a year after handing over the Tonight Show reigns from Jay Leno to Conan O’Brien, rearranged the late night programming schedule, bumping the Tonight Show from 11:30 to 12:05 and moving The Jay Leno Show to the 11:30 slot. NBC’s decision to go ahead with their late night shake-up despite a large public outcry and negative media attention marked “a conscious choice by the network to shift its priorities in late night toward a mass audience strategy and away from the more targeted lets-play-young focus that had prevailed when Conan was named for the job. NBC seemed to be conceding that the audience for late night was going to be considerably older for the foreseeable future” (Carter, 354).

When Jimmy Fallon went on ABC talk show The View following the Leno vs. O’Brien showdown, he was asked to share his feelings regarding the programming shift that would have moved his show from 12:25 to 12:55. “I don’t mind,” he answered. “I don’t think time really matters as much to my generation; no one cares what time you’re on cause we TiVo everything. [If Conan stayed] I would still be on, I would just be on later. I don’t think it would’ve mattered really for me”. Six months after Conan officially announced his departure to cable channel TBS, the late night ratings picture “turned darker – and starker. Nobody was doing well… both [Leno] and Letterman had dropped to their worst audience levels ever. The culprit, in most evaluations, was the digital video recorder, the increasingly ubiquitous machine that allows viewers to record all their favorite shows with ease,” Carter writes. “Besides the DVR, whose impact was only likely to get worse as its penetration spread from under 40 percent to more than 60 percent… the late-night shows were all seeing their relevance undercut by hyperavailability” (391).

In his article Redefining the Home Screen: Technological Convergence as Trauma and Business Plan, William Boddy explores the DVR, unpacking its implications and the “impact upon traditional assumptions about television and its audience, assumptions themselves informed by specific historical forces within and outside of the television industry”. Boddy notes that “the current turmoil … throws into stark relief how far the industry has moved from the instrumental fantasies of reception, ontology, and national identity associated with the era of network television in the United States from the 1940s into the 1980s”. The notion of watching a product titled The Tonight Show or Late Night during the day is emblematic of how “people inhabiting the pre-modern world would experience time as inextricably bound to a sense of place… [one characteristic of] modernity [is] the change that has occurred in the social arrangements of space and time,” (Wood). Recording a show that is characterized, identified, and packaged as being bound to a specific moment in time and experiencing it during another moment in time is evidence of “the modern era [as] characterized by ‘empty time’—an increasingly globalized sense of temporal arrangements” (Wood).

In an open letter addressed to “The People of Earth,” O’Brien shared his opinions regarding the controversy, stating that, “for 60 years the Tonight Show has aired immediately following the late local news. I sincerely believe that delaying the Tonight Show into the next day to accommodate another comedy program will seriously damage what I consider to be the greatest franchise in the history of broadcasting. The Tonight Show at 12:05 simply isn't the Tonight Show”.

O’Brien’s insistence that a show’s time slot significantly influences its cultural meaning is interesting in a media landscape where commercials are seemingly optional and the time of a show’s initial broadcast is becoming less and less important. Considering this traditionalist and somewhat old-school outlook, it is curious that O’Brien is the late night personality who best acknowledges and exemplifies the fact that “professional identity is increasingly influenced and shaped by the various ways in which professionals interact with and give meaning to their publics as consumers and co-creators” (Deuze). “Team Coco” – the name for the online community of Conan supporters – emerged in the wake of the Leno-O’Brien time slot shift, garnering extensive media attention and, as Carter puts it, “eclips[ing] ‘viral’; it was more like the plague” (202). In “Interactive Audiences?” Jenkins posits that online fan communities like Team Coco, “expansive self-organizing groups focused around the collective production, debate, and circulation of meanings, interpretations, and fantasies in response to various artifacts of contemporary popular culture” might be the most effective way for citizens to realize the potentials of the interactive new media environment (167). Team Coco stands out as among the most celebrated recent examples of these fan communities, which “have long defined their memberships through affinities rather than localities” (167). The notion of fandoms as “virtual communities, 'imagined' and 'imagining' communities,” was visible when groups “sprang up all over the web and in individual cities. The Facebook group ‘I’m with Coco’ [which boasts almost two million members] organized Conan rallies in New York, Chicago, Seattle and LA” (202).

The current Team Coco website arguably realizes Mark Dueze’s assertion that “convergence culture serves both as a mechanism to increase revenue and further the agenda of industry, while at the same time enabling people – in terms of their identities as producers and consumers, professionals as well as amateurs – to enact some kind of agency regarding the omnipresent messages and commodities of this industry”. Conan’s engagement with social media far surpasses Fallon’s, utilizing sites like tumblr, flickr, and getglue on top of participatory segments such as “blimpspotting,” “Coco MoCa,” “Fan Fridays” and “Fan Corrections”:

    Blimpspotting: Somewhere over the eastern United States there's a giant orange Conan Blimp lurking overhead. Hunt it down, check in to it on FourSquare, and earn yourself the coveted ‘Conan Blimpspotter’ Badge. Curious how to find the blimp? We've got a live tracker on that baby @ teamcoco.com/blimp

    Coco MoCa: Enter The Museum Of Conan Art -- a museum FOR the people and BY the people. So whether you're a painter, sketch artist, sculptor, or a Photoshop pixel-pusher, we want to see your Team Coco themed artwork. With a bit of luck, it might end up backstage in the "Conan" Green Room.

    Fan Fridays: If there's one thing we love, it's our fans. (If there are TWO things, it's our fans and "Portal 2". Holy crap that game is so awesome... But we digress). Our fans are our lifeblood. Our bones. Our skin. The wind beneath our wings. The clam in our chowder. The buttons on our overcoat. The sequins on our Michael Jackson glove. I could go on. The point is, TEAM COCO FANS RULE. And we want to celebrate our ruling fans - that's YOU, btw - by profiling one at random every week.

    Fan Corrections: Have you noticed something on "Conan" that's not quite right? Be it a factual error, incorrect pronunciation or some other random stupidity, we want to hear about it. So fire up the old webcam, make a video explaining our alleged screwup, and upload it as a Video Response to this YouTube video. We might just investigate the accuracy of your claim – and feature you on our show.

It is clear that the producers of O’Brien’s content “presume a more active spectator who can and will follow these media flows. Such marketing strategies promote a sense of affiliation with and immersion in fictional worlds” (Jenkins, 165). The name “Team Coco” – a term originally coined by fans which now stands as the name of O’Brien’s official website and used as a referent for the people involved in the actual production of his TBS show “Conan” -- offers an interesting example of the simultaneous sincerity and incongruity that resides in the attempts of “cultural industries” to both involve and profit from individual viewers. Who, exactly, is on this “team” and how equally are influence and agency distributed among these members? While Team Coco originated as a grassroots movement to redress a decision made by a major American network, it has arguably undergone a process of commodification via O’Brien’s embrace and expansion of it.

On May 3rd, 2011, Steve Martin appeared on “Conan”. The following segment took place towards the end of the interview:

O’Brien: It has always been a dream of mine to play deuling banjos with Steve Martin.

Martin: Okay. You kick it off.

[Conan plays his part]

Martin: My banjo is in the dressing room.

[the camera follows Martin as he walks the considerable distance to his dressing room. We see backstage, we see the messy dressing room. He picks up his banjo, plays his part, puts it back on the stand. The camera follows him as he walks back to the stage. He sits down. Conan plays the next part of the song.]

Martin: Oh, you want to keep playing.

[He stands back up; the bit is repeated.]

The segment is emblematic of new media: people connecting and collaborating, regardless of physical proximity; fulfilling a desire to do something or interact with someone without really ever doing it or interacting with them; the sharing of mundane, unnecessary, and private moments with the whole word, exemplified by the long, tedious shots of Steve Martin walking and invasion of the dressing room space. Furthermore, the fact that Martin – famous for being an actor and stand-up comedian – is on the show to promote his new blues album is indicative of the ways in which media content is constantly being repurposed in order to be marketed more effectively for a particular audience or platform.

In theory, we could be watching an interview from 1993; the classic tropes of the late night talk show are all present, both O’Brien and Martin have been in the business for over two decades, and, as opposed to Fallon’s high tech set and hip hop house band, there is no real indication that its 2011. It is a different time, a different channel, a different show. But everything is pretty much the same.

    Works Cited

    Caldwell, John. "The Business of New Media." The New Media Book. 2002. 56-68. Print.

    Carter, Bill. The War for Late Night When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy. Plume, 2011. Print.

    Harries, Dan. The New Media Book. London: British Film Institute, 2002. Print.

    Jenkins, Henry. "Interactive Audiences?" New Media Book. 2002. 158-170. Print.

    Marshall, P. David. "The New Intertextual Commodity." New Media Book. 2002. 70-104. Print.

    Sternbergh, Adam. "Is the Good-Natured Jimmy Fallon the Logical Heir to the 'Tonight Show' Chair? -- New York Magazine." New York Magazine -- NYC Guide to Restaurants, Fashion, Nightlife, Shopping, Politics, Movies. 10 Nov. 2010. Web. 25 Apr. 2011. <http://nymag.com/arts/tv/profiles/69366/>.

    Wood, Helen. Talking with Television: Women, Talk Shows, and Modern Self-reflexivity. Urbana: University of Illinois, 2009. Print.