Is Jimmy Fallon the Web-savviest late-night host on network television? *
Photo: Rennio Maifredi * On a Friday afternoon in mid-March Jimmy Fallon stands on the stage of NBC's Studio 6B fine-tuning tonight's monologue. Twenty or so Rockefeller Center tourists are quietly ushered in to watch the host of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon tell one joke after another, each scrawled on a scrap of paper. If the gag works and the audience laughs, it stays in the pile and makes it on-air; if it stiffs, Fallon drops the paper to the floor, where it's presumably swept up and FedExed to Carson Daly.
"President Obama has been invited to his 30-year high school reunion in Hawaii," Fallon reads, teetering back and forth in his sneakers, as if he can barely wait to drop the punch line. "I heard they tracked him down on Facebook."
The joke draws a huge laugh from the crowd, possibly because these polite Midwesterners are hoping that the sooner this is over, the sooner they can catch Al Roker leaving the Today show set across the street. Looking a bit surprised by their reaction, Fallon turns to Late Night coproducer Gavin Purcell, who's sitting on one of the guest couches balancing a laptop on his knees.
"I don't even get that." Fallon shrugs. "I like it, though. Do you get it, Gavin?"
"Everybody gets contacted through Facebook for their reunion," replies Purcell, barely looking up from his computer.
"OK, good," Fallon says, turning back to the audience. "People never invite me to their reunion." That self-deprecating ad-lib earns a few more titters. The joke stays.
Not long after, the onlookers are escorted from the studio and Fallon takes a seat at his desk, huddling with Purcell and some Late Night writers. In a few hours, the 34-year-old comedian will swap out his jeans and T-shirt for a suit and tie to tape episode number 15 of the mildly anticipated but widely scrutinized talk show he took over from Conan O'Brien on March 2. Later, during the actual taping of the show, the Obama Facebook joke won't go over as well with the packed house as it did with the tour group. But Fallon will rebound with an amusing segment on fantasy iPhone apps and end with a wacky appearance by the founders of the Universal Record Database, a Guinness World Records-type site for DIY video stunts.
Let's just come right out and say it: Jimmy Fallon is not as funny as Conan O'Brien. In fact, there are entire episodes of Late Night in which Fallon, the manic, cowlicked goofball from Saturday Night Live, seems desperate for any chuckle he can get. But there's still good reason to tune in at 12:35, five nights a week. While most talk show hosts rattle off toothless political one-liners and riff on cheesy celebrities, Fallon is devoted to a subject that rarely gets any play on a major network: unbridled, unapologetic tech geekery.
Coproducer Gavin Purcell takes notes as Fallon geeks out.
Photo: Jeff Mermelstein In Late Night's first month, Engadget editor Joshua Topolsky stopped in to show off the hotly anticipated (to some, anyway) Palm Pre, Diggnation's Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht came on to discuss top online stories like roadside hacking, and Fallon cajoled viewers to follow an audience member's Twitter feed (bumping the newbie tweeter from seven to 20,000 followers overnight). Sure, Jimmy Kimmel scored with a couple of viral videos, and nobody can harness the hive mind quite like Stephen Colbert, but Fallon is the first mainstream chat show personality to blatantly court the online generation.
And unlike most TV hosts, he's convincingly conversant with this world: Compare Fallon's interview with Topolsky to, say, Charlie Rose's recent sit-down with Twitter cofounder Evan Williams. Fallon's conversation was like an easygoing back-and-forth between two tech-savvy pals; Rose's felt more like an episode of Grandpa Learns of the Magic Computer Box. "When I first got the show," reporters said, 'Are you going to involve the Internet?'" Fallon remembers. "And I was like, 'You're obviously old. Duh.' This is part of our lives."
In fact, Fallon dreamed of having the Web-savviest show on network television. But to pull it off, he needed a secret weapon—an expert in this arena to prove he wasn't some digital dilettante. So last summer, as he was putting his staff together, he poached Purcell, executive producer of G4 Network's games-and-gadgets omnibus Attack of the Show!, to be his envoy to the online world. It was Purcell who goaded Fallon to get on Twitter, escorted him to this year's Consumer Electronics Show, and granted him entrée into the prickly geek community. "Working with that audience for so long, I know they're really vociferous," Purcell says. "Making sure they know Jimmy's on their side and establishing that he's not a fake is important. I've seen that crowd do great things, and I've seen that crowd really turn in a big way. It's important they feel taken care of."
So far, the Purcell-Fallon outreach program appears to be working. "There wasn't really any public sense of Jimmy being into gadgets or being a nerd," Engadget's Topolsky says. "But he seems sincerely interested in technology. And the fact that Gavin is involved, given his background, says to me that it's not just a passing phase." But Fallon is steering a comedy franchise, not launching a startup. Is being a geek enough to make his Late Night a hit?
In spring 2008, when word got out that Lorne Michaels had picked Fallon to host Late Night, general reaction ranged from fragile optimism (Defamer: "Jimmy Fallon's Show Might Not Suck That Bad") to exuberant disdain (The Superficial: "His unfunny ass still walks among us ... expect violence in America to go up"). But to be fair, let's not forget that O'Brien had a rocky launch, too. A complete unknown before taking over for David Letterman in 1993, O'Brien appeared excruciatingly uncomfortable on-air and incapable of landing a decent punch line. It took nearly two years of merciless media criticism and audience indifference for O'Brien to fine-tune his comedic style. Once he settled into a groove, he endeared himself to audiences with signature bits like "In the Year 2000" and an infamous recurring skit involving a diaper-wearing, self-pleasuring bear.
But at least O'Brien had the benefit of a low profile going into the gig; he had nowhere to go but up. Fallon, on the other hand, takes the reins of Late Night as a famous face. His stint on Saturday Night Live from 1998 to 2004 is remembered mostly for his role as Tina Fey's rumple-headed sidekick on Weekend Update, and he spent much of his sketch time cracking up over his own lines. His post-SNL movie career never quite took off—the only notable credit on his IMDB page is the 2005 baseball comedy Fever Pitch. "Making a movie is hard. It takes a year of your life and then when it comes out, everybody says it sucks," Fallon says. "With the show, I get immediate feedback. I can jump online and ask 'Does this joke work?' and get a response. We don't have to wait for the 30th episode to see what sucks and what doesn't."
Of course, the Internet is also one of Fallon's toughest competitors. For years networks battled over the late-night audience, but that coveted 18- to 34-year-old demo has since flocked to the Web and has been difficult to woo back. "There are a lot of people that age who just don't watch TV," Purcell says. "But if you start doing content online that's in the vein and the voice of the show, you may turn that person into a viewer." The producers of Late Night spend their days figuring out how to turn broadband addicts into broadcast audiences, with one eye on the laptop and the other on the flatscreen.
A few hours before showtime, Purcell is negotiating his way around his cramped workspace a few feet from Fallon's office. It's set up like a tech-junkie command center: There's a comically oversize, wall-mounted television broadcasting his Twitter page, a desktop computer brimming with unread newsfeeds, and all manner of gizmos sitting in the moving boxes around his desk. It's been just six months since Fallon persuaded the 34-year-old to leave Attack of the Show!, relocate from LA to New York, and help infuse Late Night with the sort of overzealous tech worship that made AOTS a runaway hit for the G4 cable channel. Over his nearly four-year run on the show, Purcell beefed up its gadget coverage, elevated game designers to rock-star status, and amped up newsy coverage of online phenomena and viral videos. Exactly the kind of stuff Fallon wants for Late Night.
The two men have spent the past few months putting in late hours here at 30 Rock, and they've established a familial rapport not unlike far-flung cousins power-bonding at Thanksgiving. As Purcell talks about his ambitions with Late Night, Fallon bounds in, looking for new videogames.
Fallon on his tech-friendly set.
Photo: Jeff Mermelstein "Have you tried this?" Purcell asks, holding up a promo copy of Skate 2 for Xbox. "It's supposed to be phenomenal."
"I know, I know," Fallon says, poking around Purcell's desk. "But I like Tony Hawk."
"They say this is better."
Fallon, skeptical, gives the packaging the once-over. "Fuck, I'll try it," he says, scooting back to his office.
Purcell's entire career has been about spotting and absorbing online trends before they break wide. Now, he's launching them. In February, for example, Late Night created a hilarious viral clip when the show's trio of bloggers noticed that Louisiana's awkward young governor, Bobby Jindal, was drawing frequent comparisons to Kenneth, the goober NBC page from 30 Rock. Within hours, Purcell and company used their network connections to recruit actor Jack McBrayer, who plays Kenneth, to deliver a parody response demanding that the Jindal comparisons stop. The clip scored major traffic on the show's site, generating much-needed buzz for the premiere of Late Night and mollifying Fallon's harshest detractors.
Last fall, under Lorne Michaels' orders to work out any prelaunch kinks, Fallon and Purcell churned out a series of daily webisodes, doing much of the filming and editing with a skeleton crew. The clips began streaming three months before Late Night's premiere, and though most of the videos were pretty mundane—Fallon playing around on iChat, Fallon getting Lasik surgery—thousands tuned in. The site generated comments, turning it into a sort of decentralized focus group. To Purcell and the other producers' surprise, the most commented-upon video found Fallon surveying possible Late Night logos, allowing viewers to weigh in on the final design*.*"We have this really huge palette of people," Purcell says. "It's a chance to do all these interesting social experiments that may or may not play out exactly how we want but still make for interesting TV."
Still, network execs want a successful show, not a science project, which means Fallon also has to satisfy millions of viewers who may not get (or care about) user-interface zingers. "We've done a couple of jokes that might have been too geeky," Fallon says. Or at least, too early-adopter. Several weeks before Oprah and Ashton Kutcher made Twitter a household name, Fallon made a quip in his opening monologue about the site's 140-character rule. It was met with confused silence.
?uestlove, drummer for house band the Roots, sometimes tweets between beats.
Photo: Jeff Mermelstein Despite a few early audience-wide fails, the geek strategy is a boon to ratings, with 2.2 million viewers tuning in each week. Purcell intends to take Late Night even deeper into G4 territory, with more gadgets, tech news, and Net-born personalities. By the fall, you might find Moot, creator of Web sensation 4chan, sitting in the greenroom with Cameron Diaz. (Note to Diaz's handlers: Do not let this happen.) "Internet-media fans have this kind of protected, special thing," Purcell says, "like, 'Other people don't get us.' Now we're reaching out and saying, 'We do get you. We like what you're doing. Come be a part of this greater media world.'"
There's a knock on the door. It's Fallon again, returning from his Xbox session with Skate 2.
"Dude, it's great," Fallon says. "My new favorite game."
"After seven minutes?"
"Honestly, it's insane," he says. "You step on the board and ... awesome."
Once again, Fallon darts away as suddenly as he arrived. A few minutes later, he's standing in the middle of his office, jerking and jabbing his Xbox controller, lost in work-related research.
Brian Raftery (brian.raftery@gmail.com) wrote about musician "Weird Al" Yankovic in issue 16.10.
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