Kiss Me, Craig

Five nights with CBS's newest late-night host.

By Dana Stevens (Slate.com)

Updated Tuesday, Jan. 4, 2005, at 12:56 PM PT

There's a great tradition of shooting down incoming talk-show hosts after their 
first night on the air. When Conan O'Brien took over Late Night on NBC, the 
Washington Post's Tom Shales called him a "walking shambles" and wished he would 
return to the "Conan O'Blivion" from whence he came. A few seasons later, Shales 
was crediting O'Brien with pulling off "one of the most amazing transformations 
in television history" and providing glowing pull-quotes for his NBC bio page.

Judging a newcomer after just one show seems as cruel as critiquing the d?cor of 
a friend's new house while they're still unpacking their boxes. So in the spirit 
of holiday charity, and to disprove the clich? about Americans and our short 
attention spans, I'm giving Craig Ferguson, the new host of CBS's The Late Late 
Show, the whole week to win me over. I'll spend every night this week with the 
Scottish comic, patiently waiting for him to make me laugh, and report back here 
the next day. Believe me, that's more of a chance than most men get.

Monday, Jan. 3, Opening Night:

Monologue: Fergie-can I call him Fergie?-has a rumpled, craggy British face, 
Gabriel Byrne by way of Colin Firth, with those long smile lines (or "junkie 
dimples") reminiscent of Mick Jagger. In the fresh-faced, frat-boy world of 
12:30 a.m. talk shows, a little crag is a good thing. He appears delighted as he 
bounds onstage, but there's not a legitimate laugh to be had in the standup set, 
which is not exactly ripped from the headlines. One joke involves the week-old 
story of Liza Minnelli's hospitalization: "How drunk do you have to be to fall 
while you're actually lying down?" In the name of politeness, I chuckle wanly.

Comedy Bits: There's a long, tangled jumble of these, which makes the show feel 
unstructured and potentially endless, like an ill-planned child's birthday 
party. (This sense of impending chaos turns out to be warranted when the show's 
interviews run so far over that musical guest G. Love never performs.) A 
Lettermanesque bit titled "Things You Will Never See on This Show" features a 
sidekick called the Vaguely Racist Parrot, clearly modeled after Conan's Triumph 
the Insult Comic Dog. The eponymous bird, perched near Craig's desk, croaks out 
xenophobic clich?s like, "French people are rude and smell like cheese." Things 
devolve: The parrot makes a penis joke somehow linked to Ferguson's 
Scottishness, which in the white-on-white landscape of late-night TV passes for 
ethnic diversity.

Guests: Straight-up B-list. David Duchovny is about as '90s a celebrity as you 
can get, but he's an engaging storyteller and riffs gamely on his host's exotic 
accent. But Fergie throws away a big chance with his second guest, The King of 
Queens' Nicole Sullivan. "When I first came to America," he confides to the 
audience before she comes out, "my first date with an American woman was with 
Nicole Sullivan." The actress confirms the story: Many years back, the two of 
them went out once, kissed, then never called each other again. This interview 
is a golden opportunity to work one of the talk show's most ancient tropes: 
sexual tension between host and attractive young female guest. But the moment 
Sullivan gets a bit prim about the kiss-"it would be disrespectful to get into 
detail. ... I have a boyfriend"-Fergs backs down: "Oh, then let's get off this 
thing." Good interview technique, like good comedy, demands a balance of tact 
and aggression. If Ferguson had pushed it, this encounter could have become a 
delicious, self-deprecating tease; instead, it dissipates into awkward chatter. 
Poor Fergie. Maybe tonight he'll make it to second base with Sophie Okonedo (or, 
if things get really interesting, Jon Cryer.)