Monday evening, after the Olympics are over, Jay Leno will return to NBC's The Tonight Show, and is bringing a pair of Olympic medal winners with him on opening night. Meanwhile, as Leno plans to return with a big splash, another late-night TV host is quietly experimenting, with no advance publicity whatsoever...
Craig Ferguson, on Tuesday night's Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on CBS, quietly tried something new. For him, anyway, though it actually was something old. He did away with the studio audience, and talked intimately with his guest (in this case, actor-writer-comic Stephen Fry) just as Tom Snyder had before him.
Leno first. The former and next Tonight Show host, after weeks of laying low, has used NBC's Olympic platform to trumpet his new late-night lineup. For anyone with Olympic fever, Monday's show, featuring Lindsey Vonn, is a big draw. Tuesday's is an even bigger catch, with Sarah Palin appearing -- and she gets to enjoy the added benefit of appearing opposite Leno's rival and her nemesis, David Letterman.
And later in the opening stretch, The Tonight Show offers a mock game show featuring certain cast members of MTV's Jersey Shore, including the infamous Snooki. No getting around it: That's three more reasons to watch Jay Leno, out of simple curiosity value, than he gave us the last few months of his prime-time Jay Leno Show.
Over on CBS, Letterman is presenting original shows, and featuring such guests as Jerry Seinfeld, who was leno's inaugural prime-time guest. But if Conan O'Brien is going to appear, even as a silent cameo, no word has leaked as of yet.
But offically, the latest round of the late-night wars begin Monday. Give it two weeks for viewership to find its own level, and for us -- and NBC and CBS -- to learn if, and how much, Leno's prime-time failure will cost him in his late-night rebirth.
Meanwhile, Craig Ferguson, without any advance fanfare, devoted Tuesday night's hour to a single guest with no audience. It had an intriguing feel, robbing Ferguson of his usual double entendre asides to the audience, but allowing for an even more free-flowing conversational path than usual. He and Fry talked about American vs. British attitudes, the success of Fry's old comedy partner Hugh Laurie, bipolar disorder and cocaine abuse, and so, so much more.
At the end, Ferguson confessed to being uneasy and awkward, especially at first. Yet many of his now-signature bits, including post-show loosed-tie wrapups and hand puppets, began as off-the-cuff one-shot experiments.
Ferguson would be unwise to scrap or revamp his talk-show format at this point for a no-audience version -- he's too funny for that. But it's a nice change, a distinctive wrinkle, and shows him off in a way that most of his rivals would be ill-equipped to emulate. Why not keep trying the no-audience thing for a while, but only once a week -- as, say, a series of Casual Friday specials?
On those production days when The Late Late Show takes two shows nightly, having one of them be audience-free could be a logistical boon as well as a stylistic shift and emotional lift. At least, at any rate, Craig Ferguson is juiced enough to try something new, and challenge himself.
Over the next few weeks, we'll see if that applies to Lay Leno as well...