Not a great reason, but Paul Reiser will be on The Tonight Show tonight to plug a show that has already been canceled, after only two airings. Presumably, when they made the booking, they thought the show would still be on for at least another week. I don’t expect anything entertaining out of either man, but the possibility of an orgy of misplaced self-pity – two friends who consider themselves badly treated by NBC when in fact they weren’t – will get me watching, as long as the Reiser interview doesn’t start before Colbert ends. It will be disappointing, because Leno has repeatedly shown he no longer has any ability to take advantage of opportunities for interesting TV, but there’s always the flickering possibility that someone might go Kimmel on him.
Not a great reason, but Paul Reiser will be on The Tonight Show tonight to plug a show that has already been canceled, after only two airings. Presumably, when they made the booking, they thought the show would still be on for at least another week. I don’t expect anything entertaining out of either man, but the possibility of an orgy of misplaced self-pity – two friends who consider themselves badly treated by NBC when in fact they weren’t – will get me watching, as long as the Reiser interview doesn’t start before Colbert ends. It will be disappointing, because Leno has repeatedly shown he no longer has any ability to take advantage of opportunities for interesting TV, but there’s always the flickering possibility that someone might go Kimmel on him.
(Update: It wasn’t very interesting, except as an illustration that “lack of promotion” is a catch-all scapegoat for a show’s failure.)
There’s not much to say about The Paul Reiser Show at this point except to shake one’s head again over NBC’s development this season. Well, there is one thing: the presence of of Reiser’s (fictional) kids on the show remind us why Chuck Cunningham Syndrome is sometimes a good thing. Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s pilot special portrayed Larry David as a father, since he’s a father in real life; in the series, he either has no kids or never mentions them at any time. This allows him to be as sociopathic as he needs to be for the purposes of comedy, without tipping over into unfunny reality: if he had kids, we might start thinking about how miserable their lives might be or how screwed-up they’re going to become.