In case you were wondering, yes, we’re still watching Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. While we did indeed have some additional analysis about the show’s progression during its third and fourth episodes (or lack thereof), we decided the best course of action would be to keep them to ourselves for the time being. Because, to us, it seemed pretty clear that the team had hit a bit of a wall during the shows on Wednesday and Thursday nights and that mental and physical exhaustion was setting in, and co-producer Gavin Purcell’s tweets confirmed as much. So rather than rehash the comments we had made about the show on Tuesday and Wednesday, we figured we’d let Fallon and the rest of the team take a few days to collect themselves and see how things went next week. That is, until we read Alessandra Stanley’s review of the show in today’s New York Times.
While Stanley repeatedly points out during the course of her review that she believes that this is a show that should be judged over the course of weeks and months rather than hours, that doesn’t stop her from administering a serious beat-down on both Fallon and the show itself. Over the course of some 850 words, here are some of the choicest jabs that she landed:
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• “He looked nervous, even flustered, at first, and some of the prepared comedy was surprisingly lame.” [Ed. Note: That was the first sentence!]
• “Mr. Fallon was cute and funny on Saturday Night Live, but he is not necessarily the ideal choice for the Late Night core audience of young males: his humor is mischievous, not anarchic.”
• “Most of his skits and routines, however, seemed written for the Web, not for broadcast.”
• “Many of the routines he worked into the show in its first nights might have been better suited to YouTube.” [Ed. Note: Yes, we believe you said that already.]
• “Twitter is so overexposed that it has become a joke, but Mr. Fallon apparently isn’t in on it. He interviewed Ms. [Cameron] Diaz by posing questions submitted via Twitter. Those turned out to be as dull and anodyne as any taken from a live audience.”
• “Remarkably, given how many months he has had to prepare, many of his supposedly wacky, Web-style pranks were oddly plodding and unimaginative.”
• “[Fallon] can sometimes seem like an old person’s notion of a hip young comic.”
If this is what Stanley comes up with after stating that “It’s still too soon to pass judgment on Mr. Fallon’s talents as a talk show host,” we honestly can’t wait to read what she says when the as-yet-to-be-determined judgment time comes to pass!
