Functional Unit

Thinking about late-night talk shows for some reason. And how Jimmy Fallon might have accidentally shepherded to its era’s close. 

Maybe Conan too. Conan just started a podcast where he’s doing long-form hour-long interviews, and it was a reminder of “oh yeah, late-night talk shows are of another time.” A time much closer to vaudeville than the media of today. 

Small isolated snippets of skits and interviews and music sewn together by a singular avatar called the host. 

As they all grappled with newer competitors from the internet, YouTube stars and tiny tweets and micro-videos from the defunct Vine and now Instagram stories. Fallon was the first of the hosts to take a flagship talk show, and attempt to compete. Creating micro-moments with sheer celebrity power, but in-essence was making two-minute clips of fun and whimsy to be shared.

And it worked. Except it’s more of troubled signal in-hindsight. Because he essentially atomized the show. You no longer needed to consume the show as a whole, you didn’t have to stay up to watch the Tonight Show as a whole episode, but rather bite-size clips on YouTube.

It feels more akin to someone selling their car for parts rather than selling it as a car. 

Meanwhile other mediums are taking the concepts, and stretching it. Podcasts take the interview to its logical extreme with minimal interruptions. Musicians re-take the drop and the moment to their own Instagram accounts. 

How the format of the late-night talk show evolves will be interesting to watch. (Or more likely not as it trudges on.) But there’s an opportunity of thought here: how to bring back the size of the functional unit back to a TV show?

Think about Breaking Bad. You’ll see a GIF here and there of moments. But no one would snip out two minutes, and anyone would go “That’s all the Breaking Bad I need, thank you.” No it’s functional unit size is a multi-season arc. At most, you might pick out an episode as a magical thing to have someone watch. But it still hints at something larger.

How do bring a format that’s being reduced to minutes back to something that has to be watched as an hour-long experience?