The Daily Show and
The Colbert Report have returned to the airwaves after nine weeks of strike-induced absence. Neither host wanted to go back on the air without their writers, but their contracts left them with little choice. I watched the first episodes back of both shows. As we were watching them, Segev said, "Do you support the writers strike?" When I answered decisively in the affirmative, he snapped, "Well, then why the hell did you download these?" I explained that the
Daily Show was already paid for, the money already long gone from the iTunes monthly pass I had purchased but not completed before the strike. The auto-renewal has now been turned off, but I'm going to watch the remaining 5 episodes relatively guilt-free. And the
Colbert Report...that somehow mysteriously appeared on my hard drive. Maybe the Viacom fairy put it there; I don't know... Suffice it to say that the writers may not have received any income from my viewing of Monday night's
Colbert Report, but neither did Sumner Redstone or Les Moonves. (And, to be perfectly honest, I feel absolutely zero guilt about this. The studios are going to have a hell of a time trying to prosecute intellectual property cases on internet downloads of TV shows if they've proclaimed that viewing an entire episode online is a "promotional use" [even when there are unskippable ads embedded] and therefore shouldn't result in residual payments to the writers. If the internet episode has no monetary value, what are you suing me for? Not to mention
Betamax time-shifting blah-di-blah...I'm over it. Get your act together, AMPTP.)
So, anyway, the results of the first episodes were mixed. Jon Stewart was widely criticized for being kinda cranky about the fact that the WGA wouldn't break him off the same deal that Worldwide Pants got. I personally think that the Worldwide Pants deal was a bad strategic call on the part of the WGA. They're saying that it's a totally different case because Worldwide Pants owns the rights to Letterman's show, where as Busboy Productions doesn't own
The Daily Show or
The Colbert Report (Viacom does). But, you know, where I'm standing, CBS is getting ad revenues from Letterman the same way that Comedy Central gets ad revenues from Colbert. The difference really seems to be that
The Daily Show has more cachet as a bargaining tool than Letterman does -- higher profile, I guess, what with John Oliver traipsing around New York with picket signs, being all British and cute. Obviously Jon was a little upset, because he wants his show to go back to normal, but he's very sympathetic to labor, and he knows how much he depends on his writers for material. (Last night's episode had a great bit where Jon quoted
Cocoon and it flew right over the college-aged audience's head -- he said, "You know, without my writers all my references are going to be from the '80s. I can get up to about
Breakfast Club, and then nothin'.") He's conflicted. So Jon's first episode back was a little rough, especially compared to Colbert. Colbert has a huge advantage -- he comes from an improv background, a rich and storied Second City improv background, and is much more able to just wing it than stand-up Jon. Colbert really can just pull stuff out of his ass and be funny at a moment's notice. It's kinda brilliant. But, as I've said before, although I'm a huge fan of Colbert himself, I'm not super fond of the show. Colbert-the-persona is a little hard for me to take in full half-hour doses. If the episodes were
Aqua-Teen-sized, then I'd be totally up for it. 11 minutes of Colbert-larity, in and out, boom. But I cant do the full half hour. Which is sad, because half-hour shows are really only 21 minutes long. I have no attention span left.
Last night's
Daily Show, however, was leaps and bounds better, and featured a music cue that made me laugh hysterically -- as a response to Hillary's total non-cry heard around the world, they did a montage of presidents and other celebrities crying set to "It's Alright to Cry" from
Free To Be You And Me, ending with the classic shot of the Indian crying about pollution. Jon's cultural references really did top off somewhere in the mid-70s. I think
Cocoon is actually pushing it, timeline-wise. But that montage totally made me want to download
Free To Be You And Me and sing about how William Has A Doll and Parents Are People, People With Children, and listen to Marlo Thomas and Mel Brooks riff about gender roles. Awesome. (Speaking of Betamax...I HAD THAT on betamax! It was part of the Children's Video Library, which had an animated logo with balloons and a jaunty whistled tune. They also put out Benji movies on videotape. I miss my childhood so.) It looks like Hillary has learned the lesson Rosey Grier made clear all those years ago: It's alright to cry. Crying gets the sad out of you.
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