{"id":5312,"date":"2010-01-15T20:40:27","date_gmt":"2010-01-16T03:40:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/?p=5312"},"modified":"2010-01-15T20:40:27","modified_gmt":"2010-01-16T03:40:27","slug":"late-night-wars-2-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/2010\/01\/15\/late-night-wars-2-3\/","title":{"rendered":"Late Night Wars 2, 3"},"content":{"rendered":"

To tell you the truth, David Letterman misfired and “jumped the shark” (is that one of those expressions we’ve decided to leave to the last decade?)\u00c2\u00a0 with this item here.<\/a> There is one thing that bothers me, maybe two, which seem to justify the (much self-interested) comments from NBC executive about “Professional Jealousy.”<\/a><\/p>\n

That phrase “Mister Middle America”.<\/p>\n

Maybe I should go for the idea that overdoing this matter is better, more entertaining, than underdoing it, and accept it as the lot for a reinvigorated and feisty Letterman.\u00c2\u00a0 But It strikes me as akin to Dave sarcastically chirping in a Jay Leno voice, “Mister Middle America, ooh, I’m Mister Middle America, Jay Leno” through the past two decades.<\/p>\n

Interesting to note, too, the phrase “America is Standing Up For Jay.”\u00c2\u00a0 Dave sure has both a long and odd memory here.\u00c2\u00a0 This was the ad campaign Jay Leno ran when Dave started his CBS show — at a time when you can say the situation didn’t look all too well for Leno.<\/p>\n

This thing<\/a> is interesting.\u00c2\u00a0 You know, the belief that Jay is blowing this up may well be a principled stand, but we also that self-interest with the fact that Letterman loses to Jay in the ratings and beats Conan.<\/p>\n

I also find Jimmy Kimmel’s Leno appearance a bit off-putting at one particular point<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 “Conan and I have kids; you have cars.”\u00c2\u00a0 In a four way race, Kimmel is that odd man out.<\/p>\n

The jarring thing is that in the end, Jay Leno will return to his Tonight Show host and go back to being the ratings winner.\u00c2\u00a0 The phrase “Lowest Common Denominator” is a compliment — commercially desirable tobe liked by the largest swarth of the public.\u00c2\u00a0 We may well just take some satisfaction in the curious schaudenfruede that that network is still a fourth placer.\u00c2\u00a0 And that Jay will lose viewers in some spots in the demographic pool.\u00c2\u00a0 The curious thing is the puzzle over viewing habits — they’re, um, in this day and age, not competitors — are they?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To tell you the truth, David Letterman misfired and “jumped the shark” (is that one of those expressions we’ve decided to leave to the last decade?)\u00c2\u00a0 with this item here. There is one thing that bothers me, maybe two, which seem to justify the (much self-interested) comments from NBC executive about “Professional Jealousy.” That phrase […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5312"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5314,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5312\/revisions\/5314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.struat.com\/election\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}