It’s been a fraught few weeks for hosts like Jimmy Fallon, the subject of a recent article criticising his leadership. Others have received scorn for resuming production during the writers’ strike. Photo / Getty Images
The Hollywood strikes and the trouble at The Tonight Show are a reminder that hosts are not just your TV friends. They’re also people’s bosses.
Let’s get one thing straight up front: Of all the people affected by the strikes in Hollywood, you do not need to pity the talk-show hosts. They are well-known, well-paid people who will, as a rule, be fine.
But this is definitely a fraught time to be hosting a talk show — or, if you’re Jimmy Fallon, even not to be hosting one.
The pillory for hosts restarting production in defiance of their writers’ picket lines is getting crowded. The latest addition, Bill Maher, tried to cushion the announcement that his HBO talk show, Real Time, was returning to the air with lavish praise of his striking staffers.
“The show I will be doing without my writers will not be as good as our normal show, full stop,” he said. “I love my writers, I am one of them, but I am not prepared to lose an entire year and see so many below-the-line people suffer so much.”
Nice words, but a little hard to take at face value given that Maher recently said on his podcast that the strikers were making “kooky” demands of the studios and that they seemed to “believe that you’re owed a living as a writer.” The Writers Guild of America announced a picket of Real Time; commentator Keith Olbermann called Maher a “scumbag.” On Monday, Maher announced that he would “delay the return of Real Time, for now.”
Among daytime talk shows, The View returned to air over the WGA’s protests. (The actors are on strike too, although in one of many complications affecting the daytime shows, the Screen Actors Guild does not consider hosting to be a violation of their strike.) The Talk and The Jennifer Hudson Show both announced their returns, then reversed their plans shortly before their premiere dates.
Drew Barrymore got the most public blowback — including from the National Book Awards, which disinvited her as host — for announcing her daytime show’s resumption. On Sunday, she reversed course, saying that she had “listened to everyone” and was “making the decision to pause the premiere until the strike is over”.
There was once a time when a host who had returned without writers in the midst of a strike, citing concern for the rest of the show’s staff, could be forgiven, even treated like a folk hero. That time was (checks calendar) May.
That was when, around the beginning of the current writers’ strike, posters on social media circulated clips from Conan O’Brien’s return to NBC’s Late Night during the 2007-08 writers’ strike, when he vamped for time by spinning his wedding ring on his desktop and sang Blue Moon of Kentucky in a cowboy hat. O’Brien was called a “legend” for calling attention to how much he needed his writers — he did not make his solo labours look effortless — not to mention, digging into his own pocket to pay around 75 staffers.
But as this year’s strike went on, the guild and its vocal supporters made clear that any hosts restarting their shows during this walkout would not be showered with likes. The guild operated under different contract language in O’Brien’s time, and WGA members have said that something like his return to air would today be considered strikebreaking because airing the show inevitably involves creative work that constitutes writing.
The producers of returning talk shows, of course, disagree. I cannot adjudicate this dispute as a lawyer. I can say, as a writer, that physically writing down words is the easiest part of the job (even for a hunt-and-peck typist like me). Planning, shaping ideas, making notes, generating questions, coming up with original concepts — all of this is the work of writing, whether or not you consider it the act of writing.
Regardless, I don’t think the backlash is the result of contract wording or a philosophical shift on the nature of the scribe’s craft. Support for unions across America is rising — a 2022 Gallup poll found it at its highest level since 1965 — which has translated into 72 per cent of Americans siding with the writers over the studios. And like every strong feeling today, this one gets amplified in social media, especially when there are famous faces such as Maher’s and Barrymore’s to aim at.
The talk-show returns of 2007-08 were not without controversy. Ellen DeGeneres and Jay Leno were criticised by the WGA for doing monologues. (David Letterman returned to air with a full staff because his production company, Worldwide Pants, struck its own deal with the writers.) Even Jon Stewart, in the prime of his late-aughts iconhood, took some heat for “scabbing”. But by and large, these hobbled strike episodes were seen as testaments to the need for writers, produced more in sorrow than defiance.
Today, the expectations have changed. When Johnny Carson, who practised a cool neutrality, returned without his writers during the 1988 strike, he wasn’t seen as a hypocrite contradicting his on-air principles. In the more opinionated late-night environment of 2023, when hosts have made political bona fides part of their acts, their audiences are more likely to expect their walk to match their talk.
So it’s safer for them to do that talking through a podcast, as sidelined hosts Fallon, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver have done with Strike Force Five, starting in August. (Fox News’ conservative late-night host Greg Gutfeld, who has a non-WGA staff, has stayed on the air through the strike, though I doubt he would have been in on the group chat regardless.)
In theory, the podcast sounds like the late-night equivalent of The Avengers. In practice, it is more like Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, decaffeinated. It’s an amiable, shapeless session of five peers busting chops, trading shoptalk and occasionally reading sponsor ads like modern-day Joe Franklins.
But other than its mission statement — to raise money to support the hosts’ out-of-work staff — it is only rarely about the strike. In the third episode, Colbert surprises his co-hosts by having an AI simulator read ads in their voices. “This is why the guild’s got to hold the line, this is why SAG’s got to hold the line,” he says. “Because we’re all going to be replaced by robots by Christmas if we don’t.”
Strike Force Five is a solution to a practical problem: to raise money for idled workers. But it’s also a solution to a celebrity problem: to give its hosts a public presence and voice without their becoming the bad guys. The 2007-08 work stoppage had strike beards; this one has a strike pod. (The latter, 15 years later, is as exclusively male as the former.)
After all, one danger of the strike to talk-show hosts is that it disrupts an illusion that their programmes depend on: that the host is your friend, not somebody’s boss.
Talk-show hosts are authorities whose job is to act as if they don’t have authority; they play jokers or confidants or snarky outsiders throwing cream pies in the face of power. But even if they are hired and sometimes fired by networks, even if they vocally support the unions, they are nonetheless management.
This became uncomfortably clear with the recent Rolling Stone exposé into conditions at Fallon’s Tonight Show, whose staffers described a “toxic workplace” where miserable employees would use guest dressing rooms as “crying rooms.” Fallon later apologised to his staff in a virtual meeting, joining DeGeneres in the club of talk hosts with likeable public personas and boss-from-hell reputations.
That particular hot topic has not yet come up on Strike Force Five, at least some of whose recent episodes were recorded before the Rolling Stone article appeared. (In the meantime, we have learned that during the strike, Fallon considered reading Moby-Dick and “got into kebabs.”) Granted, the subject might be awkward amid the hosts’ marriage stories and tales of teleprompter screw-ups, but it would be worth acknowledging on a podcast meant to support late-night workers.
Talk shows, even the most issues-oriented, are on some level escapes. But at the moment, it’s hard for them and their audiences to escape one essential truth: Your favourite show is somebody else’s workplace.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: James Poniewozik
©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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