Well, Late Night With Jimmy Fallon finally premieres tonight. And not only are we not committed to hating it, we’re actually sort of looking forward. Despite his movie roles, TV appearances, and music, we still find the guy weirdly charming, and, after three months of increasingly not-bad webisodes, we’re starting to think he might be able to put together a decent talk show (or at least something that will seem intermittently funny on weeknights at 12:30 a.m.). But Fallon’s will be the first NBC late show created on Ben “Pepsuber” Silverman’s watch — so how shilly will it be? According to a new interview with the show’s co-producer, pretty shilly!
The Business Insider spoke with Fallon’s Gavin Purcell, former producer of G4’s Attack Of The Show, who offered a few hints as to what we might expect from the new Late Night. For starters, as previously reported, it’ll feature live ads and in-show segment sponsorships:
Similar to the way Revision3 hosts tout sponsors products, the show will eventually (not at the start) bring live commercials back to broadcast television. Gavin told us the model will be the natural way Howard Stern sets aside a few moments to talk about products during his show. It won’t be a “hard sell” but a “fun sell.”
Slightly more interesting is the plan for “product-oriented guests”:
[Purcell] said his team has been working hard to book the Palm people [as guests] so they can show off their new iPhone competitor, the Pre. If Fallon’s show was already on the air, you probably would have seen Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos touting the Kindle 2. Jimmy is a huge gamer, so video-game designers with new projects out will sometimes be guests too. These kind of appearances won’t be paid for. The idea is that product-oriented guests bring the kind of audience to a show advertisers like to pay to put their products in front of.
We’re going to give Fallon the benefit of the doubt; it’s not like McFlurrygate has ruined our enjoyment of 30 Rock or anything. Plus, televised product demonstrations are probably only a little worse than just having guests on to talk about their new movies — and maybe they’ll be less boring!
Five Ways “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” Plans To Change TV Forever [Business Insider via Fimoculous]
