On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 2:27 PM, David Lynch <[email protected]> wrote: > I didn't miss the comedy bits last night, but I did actually miss having an > audience. Not so much the manic, whooping crowds that Craig's seemed to have > recently, but he seemed to be a little lost without the feedback. It may > just be the people I've watched do the "one host, one guest, zero audience" > genre of talk show (Tom Snyder, Larry King, Charlie Rose, Kevin Pollak,) but > I've found that they really need a host and a guest who are genuinely > interested in the topic of conversation while avoiding the esoteric in order > to keep my interest, and I think that some kind of live audience might help > a host realize when he/she is getting off track. > > I wonder if some kind of middle ground would work - a small audience and a > few jokes before getting to the guest(s), not entirely in the > Carson/Letterman/etc comedy-variety style and not entirely in the > Snyder/Rose/etc conversation style. Intimate but not in a vacuum.
I did not miss the audience at all - the audience is almost always the problem. In a conversation not every part is equally interesting, but if you hang in there it will come around. I think maybe that is why I did not hate Oprah as much as I usually do when she interviewed Leno - there was no audience (which has a horrible effect on both of them). It is not so much the audience per se, but the pressure an audience puts on the host to make sure they laugh every 15 seconds. Two minutes of silence during an interview would be read as a failure (this is one of Conan's biggest problems as an interviewer). What was nice about Ferg in this show was the lack of any obvious pre-interview, but the pre-interview is almost an understandable necessary evil with a live audience, as they live in so much fear of 30 uninteresting seconds. I only watch Ferg periodically, but if he did more of these I would TiVo him and watch regularly. -- TV or Not TV .... The Smartest (TV) People! You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TV or Not TV" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/tvornottv?hl=en
