Late Night - The Tom Shales Saga

 In an interview with Howard Stern, Conan talks about the rough experience of his early Late Night days and identifies the specific moment when he was at his lowest:

"The one that comes to mind is... we were just on the air for 2 or 3 months and things weren't going well and then I did Charlie Rose's show when he went, 'Well, you're probably aware of what came out in the Washington Post today... The top TV critic in the world just wrote this piece and here's what it says- and it goes...' It was a brutal take down of me, Andy, everything..."

This is a story Conan had told before, though the way it was told and the location in which it was told obscured its gravity. In 2003, Conan recounted the Charlie Rose episode to Charlie Rose:

Rose: I remember at one point you, early, were on my show--

Conan: Yes.

Rose: And it was during the difficult time.

Conan: It was the beginning of the difficult time, I think, you- you informed me of one of my worst reviews when I was first here.  It was about 2 months into the show--

Rose: I read it to you?

Conan: And you said I don't know if you're aware of this and you started reading and it had just come out that morning... 

Now, through the magic of Youtube, we can watch the original 'offensive' interview from 1993:

Here is what Charlie Rose actually said:

"If in fact you're doing the show you want to do and critics - I just saw a piece by Tom Shales, I think, saying, 'Look...', you know, it's not working for him as a critic - does it bother you or do you say to those critics, 'I'm doing the show I want to do. If you don't like the show I want to do, then sorry. I can't please everybody but this is what I want to do, I found my voice, it's the show I want, it's the combination I want, we are approaching what I want to be."

Quite a difference. Quite a difference. It isn't Rose reading the hit piece to a horrified Conan on national TV. It's briefly mentioning the review and using a phrase - "it's not working for him" - is arguably the kindest and most sanitized summary of the article possible. 

It's amazing how wrong Conan's memory of it is. But this isn't uncommon - memory is not as reliable as people think. It's quite a problem of History. If you were writing the story of Conan, who would you take as more reliable to talk about his own experience than Conan himself? And if a person recounting the major events of their own life are unreliable, how do we trust the things passed down through indirect accounts?

That aside, I accept Conan's answer to the "lowest point' question, outside of Charlie Rose. Conan got a bad Tom Shales review during a critical point in the show, it was devastating to him and that was his lowest moment doing Late Night. And I suppose, some time after that, Charlie Rose's part grew from announcing the review to reading it.

One point that I can pretty much confirm from Conan's story is where he stresses the importance of critics back then. It does seem silly now, but they did have a great deal of power in shaping public perception, for whatever reason. 

Here is that Shales review, by the way, if you'd like to revisit it. And it's worth noting that 3 years later, Shales did another review that reassessed the show and was much kinder to Conan. Shales noted that the late night landscape had shifted drastically and essentially called Conan "The New Dave".

10 years after the original review, Tom appeared on Conan to promote his new book. Conan confronts Shales about the bad review (though within the bounds of the playful interview shtick).

Another aside about memory and history. In this interview, we have both Conan and Shales agreeing that the phrase "white Irish shark coming at you" was used in the review when it doesn't appear at all. 10 years after an event that directly affected them, they agree on a hallucination.

A final aside. I always found it creepy how Shales sounded so similar to Roger Ebert. It was disconcerting. How is it that the top film critic in the world and the top television critic in the world are both fat men with glasses and similar voices? I don't know but I also never heard anyone mention it.

To Conan's great credit, he seems to have handled the whole thing with great grace and, of course, seems to have a great sense of humor about it all. Shales passed away in 2024.

Robert Smigel, David Letterman and Jim Downey

Robert Smigel (head writer for Conan, writer for SNL, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog) has a podcast.

In this episode, he talks to Jim Downey (Conan, SNL) and David Letterman (himself).

To the casual observer, this doesn't mean much but for someone like me, it feels like the Super Bowl.

The premise of the show (or the premise of the show within the show) - that someone in Turkey wants help writing an email to Steve O'Donnel (Letterman, Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Norm Macdonald) - is ludicrous, bordering on annoying. But, again, it really doesn't matter what the premise is, with this panel.

Formulating the Ultimate Fried Chicken

My biggest problem with cooking as an artform is laziness combined with lack of motivation.

My second biggest problem is that chefs present to you the best way to do things as if they are Moses coming down from the mountain top and my first reaction is "Why? How do you know?" Not in a teenage-with-attitude way, but in the way that I know I can lookup the best way to scramble eggs and find 5 different chefs with 5 completely different approaches telling me that their way is the best way, all while an infinite number of other combinations exist that have never been tried.

For that reason, this video hits hard. Even if I disagree with his conclusions, this type of methodical, empirical approach to finding the best fried chicken recipe is exactly the thing to get me really invested in a cooking video.

Andy Rooney in Professional Wrestling

Dan Soder and Will Sasso do impressions.

Why Are You Laughing? - The Life and Times of Tim

"Why Are You Laughing" the history of comedy podcast, talks about the HBO animated series "The Life and Times of Tim."

And since you, and I, have never seen or heard of the show, it becomes a case of "Eh? You want to check it out, right?"

And I do want to check it out because he uses the magical phrase "the most underrated show of all time." Any show with that descriptor is a show I want to see. Of course, I think the most underrated show of all time is the Canadian show "The Newsroom" - which nobody has seen and when you suggest it people think you're talking about a different show and dismiss your opinion, and even if they don't, and in the 1-in-a-million chance that try to check out the show, they won't find it anywhere; but even if they did find it and watched it, they'd shrug and say "meh, it was just 'ok'" and not see where I was coming from at all, maybe you just had to be there, man - but that's neither here nor there.

Or maybe my pick for most underrated show of all time is "Hogan's Heroes."

Living in Cyberiad Revisited

 A while back I tested the sophistication of AI by asking it to complete the request of the Electronic Bard from The Cyberiad. To understand what I'm talking about, you can read revisit that here.

The prompt is as follows:

"Have it compose a poem - a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"

AI has made major leaps in the past 3 years, so what does it say now?

Chat GPT:

By the way, I'm using pictures as a way of escaping the problem that my blog is probably used as input to build the AIs.

So for Chat GPT: all words beginning with S - Check; 6 lines - Check; no rhyming, no narrative, very strange repetition of the word "saga" for some reason. Terrible.

How does Gemini do?

 Much better! All words begin with S, it rhymes, 6 lines, it almost conveys meaning. In fact, I would say it's blinking in and out of a sort of correct answer.

And Deep AI:

Not all words begin with S, 6 lines, with rhymes, mostly nonsensical.

And since it looks like a third part is called for, let's define what my conception of success is. The baseline correct answer that I woud expect is just to return the already written poem from The Cyberiad. AI should be able to recognize that the answer already exists and that's all I'm looking for, for now. But, in case AI never registers that answer, the goal over and beyond that would be to actually write an original poem that satisfies all the conditions.