NBC Late Night Battle: David Loftus

Before I go shooting off my mouth here, you understand of course that I don’t particularly give a rip? Back when he was host of The Tonight Show, Leno’s monologue usually got a few chuckles out of me whenever I happened to stay up after the local 11 o’clock news or returned from the dog’s final walk of the day and the TV was still on. I always loved the Monday night feature, “Headlines” (which is a very old idea that traces its lineage back through the Columbia Journalism Review’s collections -- such as Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim -- and the tiny notes at the end of New Yorker articles). For O’Brien fans to complain that he’s an odd man out strikes me as ironic, because he was always odd man out, wasn’t he? That was part of his appeal, once Letterman stopped playing that edgy alternative role and became just another mainstream figure.

But neither Leno nor Letterman nor O’Brien nor any other late-night show host was ever a must-see for me. I was either snug in bed and well on my way to sleep, or I had a much better reason to be up at midnight: a rare work project, or socializing, or reading a good book. If I had been inclined to watch anything, it would have been something with more substance -- either a good movie or Nightline.

What is the purpose of these shows, anyway? They’re singularly devoid of significant content; they’re the ultimate white bread of a white-bread medium. My theory? Late-night talk shows are pabulum for insomniacs: soothing, beige, inoffensive “white noise” that passes the time in an unchallenging manner for people who routinely have trouble sleeping, either because they simply are tense to begin with, or they drink too much coffee every day in the course of performing a job they can’t stand or just possibly love too much. (Facebook also seems increasingly to be filling that gap for a certain percentage of the population of late.) “Waiting for Godot,” which serves as a beautiful metaphor for just about anything humans do (and don’t do), works here: the hosts are Pozzo (remember, the big fat guy holding the rope?), the shows and in fact all of TV are Lucky (the kid at the end of the rope who spouts endless gibberish), and the viewers are Vladimir and Estragon -- sitting around, waiting for something to happen that never does, because it is really up to them but they don’t seem to realize that.