The earliest casualties of the ongoing Hollywood writers’ strike were late-night talk shows, which immediately went into repeats without a writing staff to churn out jokes about the day’s events, or come up with comedy bits to slot between guests. Since the start of the strike early last month, all of the network chat programs have been dark, along with Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Daytime talk shows like Live With Regis and Kelly and The View, which rely less on writers (no monologues, no sketches) have continued to turn out new episodes.
Caught in the middle is Ellen DeGeneres, whose show is on during the day but in format more closely resembles a late-night show. As a daytime TV personality, she’s also a member of AFTRA, and has contracts in place to deliver fresh syndicated content—at least those are among the reasons cited for her return to the airwaves only a day after the strike began. About a month later, it’s sometimes tough to tell that DeGeneres’ show is going on without writers; her monologue is more of a stream-of-consciousness ramble than a collection of jokes, but it’s still funny and surprisingly cohesive, and her goofy audience-participation segments continue unabated. Even though DeGeneres’ stand-up comedy experience has undoubtedly given her a strong ability to ad-lib, you can’t help but wonder if this stuff is scripted in some way.
During the last prolonged writers’ strike, in 1988, both Johnny Carson and David Letterman eventually went back on the air sans writers in order to ensure that their nonwriting staffers didn’t lose their jobs, but so far this time around Letterman and fellow late-night hosts Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Craig Ferguson and Jimmy Kimmel (all members of the Writers Guild of America themselves) have refused to cross picket lines. DeGeneres’ choice to honor her contracts (as she would have it) or to continue getting paid (as some of her critics claim) has drawn the ire of the WGA and plenty of online pundits, as has the decision of fellow talk-show host Carson Daly (NBC’s Last Call) to return to the air as of last week.
Unlike his late-night brethren, Daly isn’t a WGA member, and he waited until NBC threatened to lay off his entire staff before reluctantly returning to work. Yet he’s been vilified at least as much as DeGeneres has been, if not more so, despite looking entirely ill-at-ease his whole first week back. Confessing early on that he was “not happy” about his show’s return, Daly hasn’t exactly made watching his show seem palatable, but he’s consistently emphasized how lost he is without his writers. He’s not a comedian like DeGeneres, and his awkward time-filling at the top of each episode is sometimes excruciating. Of course, his interviews, theoretically his strong point, aren’t much better, and it’s not hard to imagine that Daly wouldn’t be getting criticized nearly as much if people thought his show was any good in the first place.
Letterman famously filled time during the ’88 strike by, among other things, getting a shave on the air, and both DeGeneres and Daly have resorted to similarly inane stalling tactics. But their different approaches can be easily glimpsed in a gimmick that both have adopted: showcasing the talents of the off-camera staff. While Daly has a producer who can recite the alphabet backward, DeGeneres has former Luscious Jackson drummer Kate Schellenbach, now one of her segment producers, rocking out on the bongos. It’s painfully obvious right there which one of them needs writers more.