On a recent night, one of the rescued Chilean miners, Edison Peña, was a guest on The Late Show With David Letterman. With the help of a translator, Peña was rueful and charming about his ordeal underground. Then he sang the Elvis classic Suspicious Minds.
It was great TV, and a reminder of what late-night TV chat shows used to bring us: agreeableness, good conversation and interesting stories. That's not really the recipe for late-night shows these days. Movie and TV stars promoting something, the host doing some gimmicky bit and a musical performer promoting a new album or tour. That's it. If there's a train-wreck incident on the show, word gets out and people watch it online later.
Into this situation comes Conan O'Brien, again. On Monday night, Conan (The Comedy Network, midnight; CTV, 1 a.m.) arrives with fanfare. The guests are Seth Rogen, Lea Michele and Jack White. On Tuesday, they are Tom Hanks, Jack McBrayer and Soundgarden. Already, some pundits are mulling over the guest list and handicapping O'Brien's chances of having a hit show on the cable channel TBS in the United States.
It's all irrelevant. Even in the months since O'Brien's acrimonious departure from NBC and The Tonight Show, the TV landscape has shifted. Interestingly, according to reports, he is not going to do anything innovative on TBS. There will be a monologue, a desk for the host, musical acts and an endless stream of celebrity guests.
Thing is, while O'Brien, Letterman, Jay Leno and all the others have been doing their old routines, the mass audience splintered and tastes changed. For October, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was the top late-night show among viewers aged 18 to 49, according to the Nielsen ratings in the U.S. Viewers 18 to 49 are the ones that matter. Their eyeballs are the ones that broadcasters and advertisers really, really want.
Even allowing for the fact that the U.S. was in the midst of a heated midterm-election fandango, the shift is significant. Stewart's show, with less reach, being on cable, beat out the network shows of Leno and Letterman. The Daily Show drew an average of 1.3 million viewers aged 18 to 49, compared with 1.2 million each for both Leno and Letterman.
Why? Because the most compelling subject in the U.S. right now exists in that place where politics and media meet. Never mind Tom Hanks telling a well-practised yarn. Never mind Jon Hamm stepping outside his Don-Draper-from- Mad-Men persona. (He's on Conan on Wednesday night.) In a turbulent, polarized culture where the media define the battle lines, what viewers want is a view of the battlefield. They want their skepticisms supported, their views reinforced. They want the circus of politics-meets-media.
If it is true that a week is a long time in politics, then, in the TV racket, 10 months is an ice age. In January, when O'Brien's battle with NBC became public, Leno's prime-time show was cancelled and Leno moved awkwardly to retake The Tonight Show, it all seemed splendidly entertaining. An inside-showbiz epic of bitterness and betrayal.
True, it was a baroque battle of ego and money. The new issue of Vanity Fair magazine has an extract from Bill Carter's new book about the late-night wars and it makes for gripping reading. According to Carter, O'Brien was shell-shocked, Leno slept easily and NBC's Jeff Zucker swore a blue streak at O'Brien's producer.
Yet, it turns out, it was a battle over something that doesn't matter any more. The Tonight Show is an antique. If anything, the host's job is a poisoned chalice and an automatic ticket to insignificance. Letterman's show rolls along, enlivened only by forays into political comedy.
Little wonder that, in this neck of the woods, CTV, which owns The Comedy Network, decided not to air Conan simultaneously with its broadcast on TBS. It's sticking with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert at 11 p.m. Conan is where the action isn't.
You, me and all the like-minded people can be dismayed to kingdom come by the cacophony of noise that is political coverage on U.S. network and cable TV. But that's where the drama and the fun reside. Conan is so over before it even starts.
ALSO AIRING
Chile's Emergency Mine Rescue (CBC NN, 10 p.m.) takes us back to where we started today. It's a new documentary that "chronicles the miners' 69-day ordeal and the heroic work of a global team of engineers who struggled tirelessly around the clock in a desperate bid to bring the trapped miners safely to the surface." The makers, British producers working for PBS, say they had special access to the site of the San José mine from the beginning and have exclusive interviews with mining engineers and the miners' families.
Check local listings.