Author Archives: Tin Man

Leno vs. Conan

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I find this Conan O’Brien vs. NBC thing so riveting, especially now that Conan has released a statement saying he won’t do The Tonight Show if it airs at 12:05. Oh my god! Drama!! What’s gonna happen?

Seriously, I do think it’s riveting. Jeff Zucker has really driven NBC into the ground. When I was a kid, NBC was the network to watch. My parents watched The Today Show with Bryant Gumbel and Jane Pauley every morning while having breakfast or getting ready for work. At night, NBC had all the great sitcoms that kids my age enjoyed: Diff’rent Strokes, The Facts of Life, Silver Spoons, Gimme a Break, even Punky Brewster. On Saturday mornings it had the Smurfs. When I was an adolescent, I would watch Days of our Lives and Santa Barbara. As I got a little older, NBC had Family Ties, and then The Cosby Show, and then Friends and Seinfeld. Even today, it has some great comedies on Thursdays: 30 Rock and The Office. And we watch Brian Williams on NBC Nightly News every night.

I used to feel this weird loyalty to NBC, even though it was just a TV network. I felt like the three networks had personas. Even though I watched some CBS and ABC shows, watching CBS and ABC felt like going over to a friend’s house where everything seemed slightly off. NBC just seemed like the network that had everything I liked.

But Jeff Zucker has ruined NBC: first the horrible but cheap-to-produce reality shows, and then this debacle of Jay Leno at 10 p.m. Moving Leno to 10 p.m. was a risk, and while it’s true that if you don’t take risks, you don’t get anywhere, you also don’t mess with something on TV that works. Zucker messed with something that worked. Jay Leno at 10 p.m. is New Coke.

On the rare occasions when I’ve watched Leno on TV, I’ve found him annoying and boring. But for whatever reason, lots of people like him — as long as he’s on at 11:35 and not at 10. You can make fun of the public for liking him, but really, what’s the point? Many people like things that I don’t, and vice versa.

And I have to admit, I watched Leno’s final Tonight show last May and was entertained. He did a “best of” compilation of those idiots on the street who don’t know the answers to questions, and it was pretty funny.

But these days I’m generally ready to go to sleep by the time I finish watching the first half of The Daily Show. And you know what? Once you get used to watching Jon Stewart every night, it’s really weird to watch the old-fashioned host-striding-out-and-doing-jokes-before-an-audience thing. Even if the host is Conan O’Brien, and even if the jokes are funny.

Oh, and as for David Letterman? He’s not always easy to watch, and I don’t always get or like his humor, but I admire him deeply and I’m in awe of his talents. I guess it has something to do with this terrific profile of him from last September, when he was caught up in his sex scandal. An excerpt:

Craggy, bewildered, irascible Dave, with his gray crew cut, designer suits, and white socks — a nightly mind-blowing image in HDTV — has become a persona, a distinctive agglomeration of character traits, even more than his idol Johnny Carson, much more like Carson’s own idol, Jack Benny. His monologues are indifferent as one-liners and jokes, but the character who delivers them is one memorable American. He can reel off dozens of Obama jokes and McCain jokes and Paris Hilton jokes, but it is when Letterman begins to invert and mutter, when his personal neuroses and raw wounds are inflamed by the assaults of everyday life— and whose aren’t? — that is when he becomes something more than a good comedian and something like the scarred protagonist of his own comic novel — a bewildered, gutty mid-lifer at the crash intersection of American culture.

As for Conan O’Brien — he’ll be okay. He’s rolling in dough no matter what happens. Maybe he’ll go to Fox. Maybe NBC will cave in and put Jay somewhere else (doubtful).

The network has treated him like shit, but that’s showbiz.

Master of the Senate

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I’m about halfway through Master of the Senate, part three of Robert Caro’s wonderful, epic biography of Lyndon Johnson. Caro’s been writing this biography for more than 30 years, ever since he finished The Power Broker (which itself is one of the best American biographies ever written). The first part came out in 1982, the second in 1990, the third in 2002, and the fourth and final volume, covering Johnson’s vice-presidency and presidency, will supposedly come out in 2012 or 2013, but who knows.

Master of the Senate, covering Johnson’s twelve years as a U.S. senator, is terrific. The first 100 pages are a wonderful capsule history of the United States Senate and tell you everything you need to know about why health care reform has had such a rough time this past year. In part, that’s why I finally decided to start reading the book last month. I’d been meaning to do so for years, and during the week before Christmas I spotted it in a bookstore and decided that given everything going on, now was an appropriate time to pick it up.

As Caro points out, the Senate was meant to be undemocratic. The Framers preached representative government, but they were wary of the masses. The Senate would serve to cool the popular passions and allow for deliberation and debate, unlike the rambunctious House. The Framers accomplished this in part by making the Senate an undemocratically apportioned body, where every state gets two senators no matter how big the state’s population. (This was also a compromise to get the South to hop on board, of course.) They also created a small number of senators, as opposed to the crowded House of Representatives: with only two senators per state, every member of the Senate is important.

And they granted senators six-year terms, longer than presidents or congressmen would get.

And there’s a very important point about those six-year terms: the Constitution provides that those terms are staggered. This is a subtle but powerful characteristic of the Senate that we often forget. Caro quotes a scholar:

It was so arranged that while the House of Representatives would be subject to total overturn every two years, and the Presidency every four, the Senate, as a Senate, could never be repudiated. It was fixed, through the staggered-term principle, so that only a third of the total membership would be up for re-election every two years. It is therefore literally not possible for the voters ever to get at anything approaching a majority of the members of the Institution at any one time.

I think this observation is brilliant.

Grafted onto this original undemocratic structure were certain rules and traditions, such as unlimited debate; its cousin, the filibuster; and seniority. And don’t forget that until the early 20th century, senators were chosen not by the public but by state legislatures. And because we elected a president indirectly through the electoral college, the only body that was directly elected by the people was the House of Representatives.

I read part of Caro’s first book about LBJ, The Path to Power, a few years ago, but for some reason after about 250 pages I put it down and never got back to it. Master of the Senate stands on its own, though; you don’t need to read the first two volumes to get into it, because Caro summarizes Johnson’s life up to then.

Caro on Johnson is alternately exciting and frustrating and maddening. LBJ comes off as a master tactician — you can’t help but be awed by his audacity and brilliance in achieving power — but he also comes off as a Machiavellian asshole who is willing to ruin the careers (and lives) of perfectly innocent men in order to get where he wants to be. I don’t really enjoy reading about people who aren’t likable, so it’s depressing at times. But if you have any interest in 20th century American history, or any interest in politics at all, this is an amazing book.