well, it’s been a week and I now realize how much Craigie-poo meant to this show. I must say I am very unimpressed with it.
I know it hasn’t been very long, but unless it gets a lot better, I won’t be watching.
On Friday, Cordon had his parents on. How long till he has his kids on ?
I’ve watched the first two episodes. (Note that Thurs and Fri were reruns due to the basketball tournament. Nice timing there CBS.)
The first one was merely mostly bad. The Willy Wonka Golden Ticket opening started off well but then dragged on and on. The Tom Hanks movie bit was also quite long, but at least Hanks kept it going pretty well. Corden couldn’t keep up.
The second show stank from beginning to end. It was unbelievably bad. The soap opera sketch was particularly pathetic. Again, Corden displayed a complete inability to keep up with his guests.
This show has multiple problems.
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Corden giggles at his own “jokes”. Comics laughing at their own jokes is a major turn-off for me. Giggling at all is bad. So this is really, really awful. Giggling is frequently a sign of insecurity. He is clearly over his head and knows it.
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The guest handling is bad. The dressing room door thing is stupid and sloppy. Having the guests enter past the audience is never going to work with most guests. (In fact, a lot of people won’t go on such a show.)
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Corden’s interview skills are terrible. He barely got into CSI:Cyber with Patricia Arquette. This is a CBS show. It should have been a major topic with a clip. He didn’t follow up on several natural topics.
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The dual guest thing. This is a “British” style. We aren’t in the UK. US celebs don’t like it. (Which again reduces the guest pool.) It leads to awkwardness. E.g., it makes it hard to do a desk piece between the first and second guest. He has the desk and an office chair. So he rolls over to the guests, with this desk right next to him creating a set problem. It doesn’t look right.
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Any show that gives air time to Reggie Watts is by default brain dead. He is a fifth rate comic and a third rate musician. (And why does Corden get a band???)
CBS has to wait it out for a while. Shows like this, no matter how bad they start off, need some time to work out the kinks. But how long? If they are going to make a change, doing so before Colbert takes over the Late Show is best. But that is pushing it. CBS has gotten itself into a really bad jam. One they should have seen coming. Didn’t anybody at the network watch a couple of episodes of Gavin & Stacey first? That guy has no chance in this format.
Because Letterman’s not his boss. (It looks as though CBS itself is producing the show, as opposed to Ferguson’s show, produced by Letterman’s company Worldwide Pants.)
(I find your analysis of the new show’s failings to be spot-on, by the way. I’d guess that by the time Colbert’s show airs, a change for the Late Late chair will be announced.)
Carson had 2 guests on at the same time but I guess that style is out of date now in US.
Jay Leno used to always have two guests on at the same time. The first guest would move over when the second guest came on.
This guy( Cordon ) is a waste of time and space. This thing with seeing the guest’s in the green room with their camp followers is really stupid.
The band has a white guy, a black guy, a woman and a freak. That’s covering all the bases.
Having them walk down the steps and rub elbows with the common folk is, also, dumb.
I have a DVR and recorded Craig F. every night and he always made me smile and sometimes laugh out loud.
I remember when this show was " not like any other late night show".
I will check this guy out every once in awhile but it’s not something I will be looking forward to.
I miss Craig, Jay Leno and Greg Gutfeld. I must be a little weird.
I think your other points have a point, but this is madness. A) Comedy Bang Bang may not be a show for all tastes, but brain dead seems like a hard charge to make stick. B) The only serious / classically-trained / respected musician I know regards Watts as a peerless virtuoso at whatever it is he does.
Bringing out one guest at a time, and having the previous guest slide over on the couch was of course a classic of talk show decades ago.
But: A. That was a long time ago. B. He’s bringing out 2 guests at a time.
I watched the third episode with Kevin Hart and Will Ferrell plugging their crappy movie.
The opener with Mariah Carey was awful, pointless and dragged on forever. (Not to mention that the drive took place entirely on residential roads with no car pool lanes. Hence negating the premise.)
The segment with Hart and Ferrell on the couch would have been much, much better if Corden wasn’t there! When they started talking to each other about things like starting off in comedy, it held my interest. I wanted more of that.
Then there was the “game show” segment. Took forever to explain. That they were playing for an audience member was basically irrelevant. And it was just a sequence of random lines shuffled together. That was the only funny part. No need for a game show set up or anything. Again, Corden basically wasn’t helping.
One thing I forgot to mention about how poorly thought out this show is: They have a “bar” setup off to the side for some reason. Sometimes with audience members sitting on the stools. Why???
So far Corden is 0-3 in delivering a recognizable monologue. Barely tells a “joke” or two and then he’s off. People want someone who can tell jokes in this format. He apparently can’t do that. Egad.
Note that Letterman famously had a band on LNDL. He wouldn’t be opposed to TLLS having a band. The reason was money. Why is Corden getting money but not Ferguson? Ferguson’s show was run on a half-shoestring budget.
Bob Hope never stuck around on Carson, he would always leave before the 2nd guest came out. Guess he figured he was too big a star to be relegated to the 2nd slot.
Maybe Ferguson never wanted a band?
On Johnny Carson’s “Tonight Show”, ALL the guests sticking around was the norm at least for most of the run. Occasionally the first guest would be excused with a, “I know you have to be somewhere soon so…” but it may have been an ego thing with some celebs. Who knows. Bob Hope certainly stuck around that legendary night when he and Dean Martin and George Gobel appeared:
Then there was the night Steve Martin had to leave, but not really:
As regular viewers of Craig’s show know, he actually did want a band. It’s just that Letterman found it more profitable to run the show on a bare-bones* basis.
*We miss you, Geoffrey Peterson! :o
Maybe they could have cut other costs to pay for a band? But I guess Ferguson did not agree with that plan.
I thought I wrote a post about this but I can’t find it…
Anyway, the first thing I thought when the new show started was how much money they spent on it*!* So much that it was almost an insult to Ferguson. His backdrop was just a flat, 2D graphic of LA, his studio audience sat on unlit, generic bleachers, he had no band, and he had to have the Mythbusters build him a robot sidekick(!). And not only was Craig’s set tiny, but the lights occasionally went out, ***and the freakin’ roof actually leaked in the rain for a while!! ***The new guy’s set is 11:30 worthy. It’s got a full 3D model background, lights & graphics, front row table seating, and a fake bar with hot models! I get that Ferguson had a ‘wacky TV clubhouse’ kind of atmosphere, but still, a leaky roof?!?
I also don’t think the two guests at a time thing will work. It’s very different from what Carson & Leno did (the guests just moved down and only rarely interacted). And while multiple guests did create some of Carson’s best moments, they were the exception not the rule. The first episode with Tom Hanks & Mila Kunis went ok, but I can’t see it not quickly becoming annoying & gimmicky. Plus it limits the guest pool (given their huge egos I can picture a lot of celebrities refusing to share their spots with someone else). Being a big *Comedy Bang Bang *fan I’m happy to see Reggie Watts’ career advance, but sad to see him go.
I’m also curious how much input Letterman had, because I don’t think it was any. For one thing he’s retiring and since he was never very ‘showbiz’ to begin with I’m sure he’s gonna go the Carson route, you won’t see him anywhere afterwards. Something else I couldn’t help but notice: At the end of almost everyone of his shows Dave would always say,* “Now stay tuned for Craig Ferguson”*, but before the new guy’s premiere, he said absolutely nothing about it whatsoever…
Letterman had a financial interest in the success of Ferguson’s show (through his production company Worldwide Pants). He’s not involved with the Corden version of Late Late.
Dave himself only occasionally plugged Ferguson. Any “stay tuned” at the end was done by an announcer (usually Alan Kalter, who just turned 72 btw).
On Monday night, Dave specifically mentioned that Corden’s show was premiering that night and gave a nice plug.
Note that for Ferguson the money went CBS -> Worldwide Pants -> Late, Late Show.
Now it’s CBS -> Late, Late Show.
CBS is throwing a lot more money at the show now. A lot. Worldwide Pants wasn’t cheaping out on The Late, Late Show. CBS just wasn’t giving them that much money to begin with. Networks hate it when they don’t control a late night talk show. (The profits can sometimes be enormous.) They doubly hate it when the production company for one show runs a second one.
But there is sometimes a big advantage: Experience. CBS has bereft of people who could do a suitable late night talk show when they hired Letterman. He could bring in a huge number of people who already knew how to do things. They brought in writers, stage crew (Biff!), producers, even cameramen.
When The Late, Late Show started, Worldwide Pants brought in some people. Not as many since it was in LA, but still, it helped. (The problem was getting a working host. Snyder in particular was a horrible choice made by Dave to assuage his feelings about taking over the old Tomorrow Show slot. Made fun of in advance on an episode of The Larry Sanders Show.)
A large part of the problem with Corden’s show (besides Corden not a good fit) is that there are too many new people who don’t have a friggin’ clue about how to run a talk show. It’s a production mess. They don’t even have someone around who knows when to say: “This bit is 3 times longer than it needs to be. Cut it down.”
US celebs seem to like it when they are on Graham Norton. Even someone like Robert de Niro, who isn’t all that comfortable on chat shows, seems to relax a bit when he’s not the sole focus of attention. Of course, Norton is really good at his job.
The only episode I saw all of was the second, and I thought he did very well. I loved his opening monologue about California running out of water a year after he moves there. Well done!
He’s not a brilliant interviewer, but his comedy is OK.
Yep, and Matt Damon and Bill Murray pretty much say it is the best talk show experience they have ever had. They like the group dynamic. It is fun.
That episode, with Hugh Bonneville too, was very much peak chat show.
I know; I’ve never seen a better hour of talk show. Still, it’s pretty often a huge blast.