Lopez Tonight

It's almost impossible to do anything new with the late-night talk show. Many have talked about doing something different with the format, but most have just abandoned innovation in favor of shows that don't really change up the central format all that much or died quick deaths. The last show to really mix up what was going on was Late Night with David Letterman, and that was almost 30 years ago (good Lord). And even that show was basically a regular old late-night talk show with a huge dollop of irony tossed on to appeal to the kids. How long has it been since a show other than something trying to be a Dick Cavett-esque throwback did anything other than opening monologue into skit into first celebrity interview into second celebrity interview into musical guest? I guess The Jay Leno Show plays around with the format, but calling that an innovator seems false.

So the best way to innovate within a late night hour is via tone. Letterman added the irony. Conan O'Brien turned things toward the absurd. And now George Lopez has turned Lopez Tonight into the Crash of late-night talk shows, a show almost singularly obsessed both with the fact that everybody's different and that they're all, also, just the same. If the premiere of the series had the usual technical snafus (at one point, Lopez and Kobe Bryant sounded as if they were talking to us from the bottom of a well) and lame bits that all debuting late-night talk shows have, it also had a tone that seems hell-bent on deliberately avoiding the sort of audience late-night talk shows usually chase. It'd be refreshing if so much of Lopez's humor weren't so hackneyed. Read more