Flipping the Script

By James Poniewozik

In this new year, there has been an earthquake in the public arena. Front runners recast themselves as scrappy underdogs. The public proved willing to back leaders who departed from traditional scripts. And both the competitors and the media scrambled to make sense of the new rules of this upended game.

Also, there were some elections.

O.K., the analogy between politics and the late-night talk shows breaks down eventually. When David Letterman returned--his production company having made a deal with striking writers--and late-night leader Jay Leno came back writerless, the stakes were not so high. And the hosts, unlike the candidates, share an agenda: all vocally support the writers. But late night and politics are symbiotic, needing and feeding off each other. And in a way, the talk shows, which returned just in time for primary season, found themselves asking much the same thing as the political world: What happens when you throw out the script?

You could argue that the two-month late-night hiatus was a blessing or a curse for candidates. The shows have long since been institutionalized as a free-fire zone on politicians, where ridicule is relentless and labels harden into epitaphs. On the first strike-era Daily Show, on Jan. 7, Jon Stewart bemoaned the agony of watching Mike Huckabee give a victory speech in Iowa with action star Chuck Norris--"Chuck Norris!"--looking over the candidate's shoulder, yet having nowhere to do a Chuck-and-Huck gag the next night.

But politicians also need the late-night shows, on which they can end-around the harder-edged media. The night before Iowa, Huckabee kicked off Leno's return, answering such hardball questions as "How did you lose all that weight?" and jamming on bass with the house band, `a la Bill Clinton blowing sax on Arsenio Hall in 1992. Beats workin'.

Politics intruded on the writers' strike too, in complicated and ironic ways. Huckabee, who has cast himself as a worker-friendly Republican, took heat for crossing Tonight's picket line. Meanwhile, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, TV's havens-in-exile for Bush bashers, found themselves getting turned down by Democratic and left-leaning guests, since they were working without striking writers. Stephen Colbert, in character as a conservative pundit, railed against Barack Obama for pledging, if he's President, to meet with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad yet turning down the Report: "He's saying Stephen Colbert is worse than a terrorist. His words!" The strike, if it continues, could produce a critical talk-show gap. (Fortunately for Obama, Oprah doesn't have guild writers.)

In late night, there are votes too--ratings--and the results there were also a bit of a surprise. Letterman and his writers delivered the kind of funny, competent show they had before the strike. But Leno drew 2 million more viewers the first night, while Conan O'Brien, winging a wild, anarchic show without writers, had the biggest percentage ratings bump of anyone.

Huckabee, in a way, was a perfect candidate to inaugurate a writerless talk show; whatever the substance of his message, he (and Obama) are also playing on the appeal of the unexpected. Likewise, Hillary Clinton came back in New Hampshire after tweaking her guarded campaign approach. Like Leno, she infused an established, old-school brand with enough difference to renew interest.

Again, talk shows are not politics. Tuning in to see if Leno screws up his monologue is not the same as voting for a change, and Leno and company were shaking up their acts not because of some ideal but because their corporate bosses made them. (And Leno's ratings fell off after his return night.) But in both arenas, we saw that reliability and competence aren't everything. The strike, let us hope, will not last all election season. But TV's talkers--among others--learned that it's not always terrible to rip up the script.