Photo: Lloyd Bishop / NBC
So Far, Jimmy Fallon's Tonight Show Is Kind Of Just An Earlier Late Night...Which Is Fine!
You can stop crying about how much you miss Jimmy Fallon: his week-long sabbatical is over and he's back on TV.
I guess I didn't realize when I watched the last-ever episode of Late Night With Jimmy Fallon that his time off between his first talk show and what will probably be his last one was only going to be...a week? NBC's been hyping this changeover like it's tantamount to the election of a new Pope, but I feel like Fallon's taken off more days for, like, Christmas. But although I might have thought, before I saw the episode, that a week was an insufficient length of time to prepare Fallon for his new job, as soon as it started I realized I was wrong: Fallon's in a new studio, but he's still doing the same old show, and I am very okay with that.
The good stuff is still good. The house band is still The Roots. The announcer/sidekick is still Steve Higgins. Fallon will still do bits like "Superlatives"...
...and the Evolution Of Dancing.
The fact that Fallon would revive not one but two bits that would be very familiar to Late Night viewers is surely meant to be reassuring and promise continuity of service, and it is! And for the most part, the changes that remind us that Fallon's now moved up to the big time are not unwelcome. He has musical guest U2 perform a number before interviewing his primary guest (Will Smith), and sends them to the roof to do it, sending the message that he's literally atop NBC, at the helm of one of the network's longest-running franchises. He also keeps with Tonight Show tradition by making Smith sit there awkwardly while all of U2 sits there getting interviewed.
But the Tonight Show-iest moment -- one that, if my Twitter feed is anything to go by, most TV critics loved -- is this segment, where Fallon collects on $100 bets from everyone who said he'd never get the job.
It starts out charming, with people coming out who have a known connection to Fallon -- people like Robert De Niro, of whom Fallon famously does an impression, or Fallon's old Weekend Update co-anchor Tina Fey. But the longer it goes on, the less it feels like friends wishing him well rather than a braggy "look who we could get now that we're on at 11:30" parade. I mean, Lady Gaga? (And are we supposed to read anything into the fact that Kim Kardashian made a cameo on both Leno's last Tonight Show and Fallon's first one? Quit legitimizing her fame, Tonight Show!)
Closing it out with Stephen Colbert, Fallon's former best friend for six months paying his $100 with a bucket of pennies saves the segment for me, but I hope the walk-ons for walk-ons' sake don't last past the first week. Fallon's unstoppable enthusiasm means he can make anyone seem like his very best buddy, but just because he can get a Rudy Giuliani to be part of a (seemingly endless) bit now doesn't mean he should.