A late-night talk-show host scorecard
By Robert Lloyd, Television Critic
Monday night brings the nonevent -- “anti-event,” one might even say -- of TV’s winter season, the return of Jay Leno to “The Tonight Show,” marking an end to the Late Night War of 2010. (Casualties: one.) That fracas focused attention not only on the two main combatants but on the rest of the relatively small, essentially homogenous group of men who make up broadcast television’s late-night comedy-’n’-chat front line: Past Jay and, formerly, Conan, there are only Dave, Craig, Jimmy, Jimmy and Carson, kind of, holding down the desk or filling the comfy chair for the original big three networks.
But it doesn’t end there. Farther down the dial one finds shows whose hosts are not all straight white men (Wanda Sykes, who has a weekly show on Fox, is none of those things), and other variations are played on the old established forms. Herewith, a field guide to some of the rarer -- and newer -- birds of late night. (Paul Drinkwater / Associated Press)
E!, 11 p.m. weeknights
Just turned 35, Chelsea Handler is narrowly the youngest of the late-night hosts, and though she professionally paints herself as something of a disaster -- her latest bestseller is titled “Are You There, Vodka? It’s Me, Chelsea” -- and continually points up the low-rent, low-viewership nature of the show, she occupies her space with aplomb and a sort of moral authority that takes the edge off the meanness of some of the humor. She has something of a young, post-feminist Joan Rivers about her, but drier, and less hysterical, in the clinical sense, and even when she seems to be seeing the jokes in her monologue for the first time as she reads them off the teleprompter, she stays funny. (Benjamin Reed / Los Angeles Times)
BET, 11 p.m. weeknights
The talk show as tent show. Like an old Jackie Wilson song, this Atlanta-based talk show is built on gospel rhythms, mixing the sanctified and the saucy. As is true of the network as a whole, “The Mo’Nique Show” is designed as black television for black people -- “It don’t happen like this nowhere else in the world,” the Oscar-nominated Mo’Nique said one night recently, “just take a look at the colors of the host, the co-host, the band and the DJ, baby” -- but there’s nothing exclusive in the pitch or the appeal; it’s just a good party, and a loud one. (The host is hoarse throughout.) Lots of love in the air here, and when Mo’Nique falters for a question or joke she’ll go straight to praise and positivity and cultural uplift. (Gary Friedman / Los Angeles Times)
