EPISODE 829: THE BALLAD OF BILL AND DREW AND JIMMY AND KHAN
This is Jerry Springer, not Casablanca.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
Hi and welcome to Pop Culture Spirit Wow, the newsletter that dares to dream in pop culture. If you’re new to the Wow, welcome! If you’ve been around, welcome back!
I’ve got something a little different for you today, a Wownd Up about Hollywood that basically ended up taking over the newsletter. I’m going to present it in three parts, the middle of which is an interlude that I think kind of rhymes with the rest, but you tell me.
Our topic: Talk shows breaking the writers’ strike.
Our players: Drew Barrymore, Bill Maher, Jimmy Fallon…and Khan???
Minister to the Universe
We begin with Drew Barrymore, who became famous around the world at age 6 for stealing every single scene in E.T., the Extra-Terrestial. (I admit, E.T. is cute in a “scary rubber nightmare doll” sort of way, if that’s your thing, but tell me this scene still works without Drew.)
Despite a childhood in which she struggled with drug and alcohol abuse, Barrymore came out the other side of all that with that same infectiously winning personality, and has done a ton of successful movies.
In September of 2020, she started her own talk show, The Drew Barrymore Show, which given the fact that we were all neck deep in lockdown was pretty astonishing. As an audience she had viewers from all over the country, who could be seen watching on the wall behind her. And she very much tried to make the show a place of positivity and light. Today it’s known for its celebrity guests and its unguarded sentimentality.
In a sense it’s that last quality that we’ve seen on display the last 10 days. Barrymore announced that despite being a Writers’ Guild show—on talk shows writers are involved in everything from writing monologues and sketches potentially coming with good questions for guests (although that’s usually a different role)—she was going to bring her talk show back anyway, without her writers. She said the show would be in compliance with the SAG and WGA rules insofar as it would not have on actors or writers to discuss or promote any acting or writing work.
Here was her take: “We launched live during a global pandemic. Our show was built for sensitive times and has only functioned through what the real world is going through in real time. I want to be there to provide what writers do so well, which is a way to bring us together or help us make sense of the human experience.”
It sounds real good, except that last sentence is her actually saying, I’m going to do what my writers normally do, which is the textbook definition of scabbing.
As the kids say, LOL.
What has transpired since reminds me of a song from the great show Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Let me just give you a moment to enjoy that.
The WGA picketed the show. The first day of taping, picketers offered members of the studio audience WGA pins, which two people took and wore. When one of them refused to take his off on the way into the taping they were thrown out. They then joined the picket.
Drew doubled down with an emotional video (which she has since taken down—why does everyone take everything down now?) apologizing to writers but saying she was still going forward, because this is “bigger than” her, it was about people’s jobs (just not the jobs of the writers or the actors on strike, apparently).
She also said if the pandemic couldn’t stop the show, why would they let the strike—which sounds way worse than she meant it.
To use Catholic language, Barrymore clearly sees her show as a kind of ministry to people, a way of helping. And everything she has said makes me believe that she thinks doing her show in this moment could be of help even to those on strike.
In the midst of all the controversy I think most people have not totally understood or appreciated that. Personally, I’d love to see Barrymore follow through on it in some other way. Get on Instagram every day and interview writers and actors and others who are suffering because of the strikes. At this point that includes just about everyone living in Los Angeles. Put a human face on the misery that the studios are causing.
Also, set up funds to support her staff; honestly, I suspect if she simply asked her audience the money would pour in.
Elizabeth Wagmeister in Variety did a longform piece about the Barrymore Show saga, which highlighted another dimension of that show’s problem: despite being a Guild show, The Drew Barrymore Show is not a network show. It’s syndicated. You might see it on CBS, but if so that’s only because your local affiliate has a contract with the show.
In not producing episodes, the show is breaking its contract with those affiliates. Wagmeister believes Barrymore could have argued that they’re actually contractually obligated to produce television, and that the blowback would have been a lot less if she had.
I honestly think the end result would have been the same—literally as I am writing this, the Barrymore show has just announced that it’s not coming back tomorrow after all, that it will honor the strikes.
I’m also skeptical that the studios are truly not somehow profiting off the show, as well. But it does highlight just how complicated things are for that show.
As compared to Bill Maher.
Slow Jam This
But first—Do you prefer your late night talk show host to be a boyish rapscallion with cool friends who will play games with him?
How about one that you’ve always liked, but also I don’t know, something seems just a little bit hinky?
No, I’m not talking about James Corden (but good guess!). I mean Jimmy Fallon.
No one was sillier and more delightful on SNL than Jimmy Fallon. I could watch an entire movie length film of him breaking into giggles during sketches.
On the surface, The Tonight Show has felt much the same. It’s lots of really creative remixes of songs, sketches and above all, celebrity games, all done with a goofy joyous energy. I’ve always especially loved these classroom instrument sketches.
But the joy in the live parts of the show has often had a certain manufactured quality to it. As talented as he is as a singer and performer, sometimes the show has so much polish, it undermines its authenticity.
Rather than the cool kid who hosts the best parties, which is I think the vibe Fallon is going for, The Tonight Show feels at times more like one of those 80’s teen Disney shows where the kid throws the party that HAS TO BE PERFECT so he can fit in with the cool kids, or win something. As playful as he is, there’s often just an underlying sense of anxiety to Fallon.
It makes sense. These shows live and die on ratings. Also, it’s nothing next to Corden, who had a constant and overwhelming need to be loved. (I want that for him, but I found watching his show to be like having someone gently and relentlessly suffocate me with a pillow while whispering “Just a bit more now, we’re almost there.”)
According to the Rolling Stone story on the behind the scenes at The Tonight Show, there’s a lot more behind Fallon’s onstage desperation, including an unpredictable moodiness that has left everyone on the show feeling anxious all the time. And in a way I feel for him as well as them. It can’t be easy to be a late night host at all, let alone do it for ten years. I’m sure all those guys—they are, unfortunately, all white straight men at this point—have monsters in their closets.
Fallon’s response was to do an all-hands Zoom call where he apologized in this very childlike way—“It’s embarrassing and I feel so bad,” he told his staff. “Sorry if I embarrassed you and your family and friends… I feel so bad I can’t even tell you.”
It’s more than a little strange to hear an adult saying “Sorry if I embarrassed you.” That’s the kind of thing a kid says to other kids after his parents find out he’s been bullying them. There’s just a naivete to his language—kind of like Barrymore, actually—that feels innocent and heartfelt.
But not one of Fallon’s nine former showrunners would offer him a single word of support in the Rolling Stone article. Nor was even one of the more than 80 past and present Tonight Show staffers interviewed willing to speak positively on the record about Fallon or working on the show.
That is a lot more than “embarrassing.”
“It’s Time To Bring People Back to Work.”
That was Bill Maher’s comment when he announced this week that he’s bringing back his HBO talk show Real Time with Bill Maher without writers.
“Real Time is coming back, unfortunately, sans writers or writing,” he wrote on whatever the heck we’re supposed to call Twitter for the moment. (Will Musk still be here in a year? I just can’t believe it.) “The writers have important issues that I sympathize with, and hope they are addressed to their satisfaction, but they are not the only people with issues, problems, and concerns.”
People are conflating Maher and Barrymore’s decisions, but actually they’re in very different positions. Maher, unlike Barrymore, is actually in the Writers’ Guild. As such he is obligated not to work in entertainment-related endeavors right now. That’s the whole deal. His choice to speak of “the writers” and “their” concerns in the third person is nonsense. That “they” is you, Bill.
Also, whereas Barrymore’s show is syndicated, Maher is working for HBO, that is, Warner Brothers Discovery, one of the central studios opposing the writers and actors. So his choice is pretty much the worst case version of crossing the picket line. He’s like what if the Little Mermaid went to work for Ursula. And the other mermaids were like, Girl, you are helping that Witchtopus to steal our voices. And Ariel’s like No no, I’m just trying to make sure the moray eels are kept well fed.
Maher insists that there’s not going to be any monologue, it’s just going to be from the hip conversations, which is kind of the show’s aesthetic anyway. But again, this is a Guild writer saying this. That’s like Michael Jordan saying I know I’m not supposed to play basketball right now, and that’s fine, I’m just going to do one-on-one pick up games. Like, MJ, baby, no. That’s still basketball.
But what’s most insidious is the tut-tut, mommy sees you being selfish flavor he gives to some of his comments. That “It’s time” is laced with guilt, as though writers and actors don’t appreciate just how much the strike is hurting people’s lives. They’ve been without pay for five months. They know how much it hurts.
Bill Maher is presenting himself as a sort of hero of the people. But how strange is that he refuses to include his own people, which includes also the union that has supported and enabled his work, within the term.
But then again, this isn’t the first time Maher has had trouble understanding who he actually is.
Hymn for the Heroes
If you look at their stories, they thing they have in common is a desire to do good. Maher has always as himself as the rebel refusing to bow down to the assholes of the establishment, calling out their hypocrisy.
(I have to admit, it’s hard to be positive about Maher. I think he has invested so much in being a rebel that at this point most everything he does is about that posture. But I do know others who find him genuinely refreshing.)
Drew is basically everyone’s favorite camp counselor. She just wants to gather people together, so that we can just, you know, love each other and eat s’mores, you guys.
Love love love this Chloe Fineman take on her:
Jimmy Fallon might not seem to fit the do-gooder category quite so clearly. But as much as I have trouble with the slick, How can we spin this off into a TV game show quality of some aspects of the show, I would say the heart of Fallon’s Tonight Show is a belief that entertainment can actually help people, that laughter is life and relief from the burdens that we carry. At their best, Fallon’s writers, musicians, crew and Fallon himself together try to create spaces in which we who are watching can have that kind of joyous, liberating experience.
The good these people want to do is laudable. (Again, giving Maher the benefit of the doubt here.) But in a way their choices remind me of that classic conundrum of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one? Spock argues yes, of course, and dies to save everyone.
Damn that clip still hits so hard.
But in Star Trek, Spock makes a choice for himself. Maher, Barrymore and Fallon, on the other hand, are demanding it of others. Maher and Barrymore are telling their writers that the needs of their colleagues outweigh theirs, which is not only shitty but a false distinction. Many crew members have actually been on the picket lines with the writers and actors. They’ve been just as screwed by the studios over the years, and they recognize that the fight the writers and actors are having also concerns them, and what kind of future they will have.
(Did anyone even ask the crew how they’d feel about having to cross a picket line?, I wonder. Because if they’re union people themselves, I’m going to guess they would feel really really uncomfortable with that.)
Fallon, through his apparent bad behavior, has shown his staff that his needs and the needs of the show outweigh their own—which frankly I’d bet most of them would agree to. If you’re going to work for The Tonight Show, you’re going to have to sacrifice a lot. It’s the kinds of sacrifices they’ve been told to accept, ones that are humiliating and dehumanizing, that they reject.
In Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Kirk basically turns reality upside down to try and rescue Spock. And at the end, when Spock asks why he would do that, Kirk calls bullshit on the old logic: The needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many.
In a sense each of these stories is calling bullshit on old tropes, as well. It’s all a lot more complicated, in the case of the strike-breakers, and a lot more simple, in the case of Fallon.
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Thank you! I’ll be back later this week with a little somethin’ somethin’. Until then, have a great one.
Maybe it's my dead, withered, cynical heart, but I think Jimmy Fallon is a smug, untalented hack. Or maybe not, as I also think Bill Maher is a smug, untalented hack.
I can definitely see that, but I think particularly in his musical sketches there's more going on there.