Jimmy Fallon Exits Stage (Just) Right : Monkey See : NPR:
It's hard to view Friday night's Late Night With Jimmy Fallon as a true farewell, since all Fallon is doing is getting the ultimate promotion to The Tonight Show. And he's taking everybody with him.
And yet it is an ending. It's an ending to a five-year tenure that started in the shadow of a lot of skeptics () and a lot of criticism. What I said then was that LNJF's success or failure would be determined by whether his show had "a distinct point of view."
It's
funny now — those words surprised even me when I reread them, because I
had forgotten over the course of five years that I didn't know in 2009
that Jimmy Fallon even had an animating principle, let alone know that
it would turn out to be joy, which is the animating principle of
entirely too little of popular culture. In fact, the show turned out to
be, much of the time, all point of view. Less plugging, more beer pong.
Less anecdote-sharing, more getting Tom Cruise to break eggs on his
head. It's 12:30 in the morning, this show always seemed to be saying. You can learn stuff tomorrow. Everybody here likes each other.