As you no doubt are aware, you no longer have to go out and find willing sexual partners to keep yourself occupied late nights, Monday thru Friday: the network talk shows are back. We couldn't bring ourselves to watch Leno, since even on a good day, his Tonight Show material is only half-jokes, with the other half dedicated to non-joke observations engineered to garner applause rather than make people laugh, and that makes us crazy. (Also: Mike Huckabee creeps us out.) Anyway, it doesn't sound like we missed much since the big news coming from his show was that he probably broke WGA strike rules by pre-writing a monologue.
We did, however, catch most of Letterman and Conan (and, predictably, none of Craig Ferguson), and had considered liveblogging them as we had done the Victoria's Secret fashion show, but it was late and we were hard at work on other things, and besides we can't commit to watching anything all the way through if Robin Williams is involved. Suffice it to say that if a liveblog of this stuff is what you're after, you can have it. IOHO, while the shows seemed only slightly more shaggy-dog than normal (writers or no), the most interesting thing about them was that the hosts showed up thoroughly scruffy. Keep it up, gentlemen, we think ya look great (and we give facial hair an inordinate amount of thought)!
Daily Show and Colbert return next week, perhaps in time to do cleanup on today's Iowa caucus but certainly in time to provide non-scripted, off-the-cuff commentary on the New Hampshire primary. We think there's a decent chance that, if anything innovative happens in late-night before this strike ends, that's where you're gonna find it. But maybe that's just wishful thinking.
