#lee has strong feelings about allen keys and wrenches

[lastweeksshirttonight]

We're back with Strike Force Five episode two, which seems to have randomly dropped at some point after I went to bed on Saturday. I enjoy when podcasts just randomly drop episodes, honestly, makes the whole thing feel more authentically chaotic.

I started listening to this while trying to figure out how to draft for fantasy football. I am not a football fan. I don't follow football. I don't know how to do fantasy. I very much procrastinated on that by doing these notes. My team is graded C- by Yahoo btw, which is two full grades higher than I expected.

Notes under the cut y'all.

This episode opens with Fallon talking about how he forgot his show's shirts glow in the dark. Apparently Billy Crystal tried to sleep in one recently and discovered this; John also noted a time when he was trying to get his infant son to sleep while wearing one of Fallon's shirts and saying it glowed "too well".

The audience for this podcast is obviously 30-something office drones like me. I say this because Atlassian is now running ads during the podcast. They must sense that everyone listening to this has it open in tab one while having their task-overrun Jira boards open in tabs two through five. John also completely "ruins" this ad - which was very on the rails for a decent amount of time! - by suggesting that Atlassian sounds like "one of those plans G. Gordon Liddy had to relect Nixon". Fallon also claims Atlassian is the name of his Fortnite character. (I wonder how my boss feels about both of those lol)

Everyone opens by briefly talking about how many staff they have. Stephen has 210, Kimmel has about 180 + 13 writers + a bunch of crew, Fallon thinks he has 305, and John jokingly says he has 500 people before admitting he misses his legal and research staff. He's ready to say things he thinks are true, instead of "things that are legally defensible".

Stephen: "Would you guys be okay if I had a little Casamigos, I got a bottle right here...?" John: "It's 7:30 in the morning, why not?" Seth: "That's like a 24 ounce 7-11 cup..." I'm so glad this is all in an auditory medium.

John is going to continue shitting on whatever alcohol company he shat on last week, and called it "pond water". I am guessing it's somehow related to Bud Light but that doesn't really track with tequila advertising, so who knows. I have in a past life had Bud Light Margarita in a Bag once, maybe John also suffered that unique hell.

If it IS Bud Light John is talking about, I have no idea how Stephen talking about Budweiser wanting him to be the voice for a Budweiser energy drink/caffeinated beer called B to the E/B 2 the E didn't get cut. This was in about 2001-2002, so well before Four Loko, and the ad copy contained things like "your friends are heading home AND YOU'RE JUST GETTING STARTED!" (John is quietly dying in the background the entire fucking time before Googling if it ever came out. It did! Fallon is flatly like "that's illegal" in a completely baffled tone early on.)

We are 8 minutes into an hour-long podcast. Just informing you, in case you were wondering. Why yes I am obsessed/bad at football why do you ask

Kimmel insists that his early seasons - "for the first eight to eleven years" - were the worst of anyone's on the podcast. He said this after talking about, on his show, Mr. T and Jim Belushi hating each other and almost about to fight each other, his cousin doing pillow-fights early on and causing a catastrophe one episode by fighting Lennox Lewis culminating with Anna Nicole Smith falling into a cake, and another pillow fight with Tom Arnold ruining his suede jacket. I forget that Kimmel is partially of the Jerry Springer era, if not on his late-night show then from his other work, and this just really reminded me of that.

Mariah Carey wanted to be interviewed by Seth Meyers during Christmas in a functional sleigh. John tells a story about watching Watch What Happens Live where Andy Cohen, on live TV by himself, said that Mariah Carey was in the building but would not sit on the side where guests usually sit on his show and was desperately trying to fill time. Mariah seems fun.

If I had to imagine Hell for Stephen Colbert, it would be "having to fill in for a guest on The Daily Show and turning down an advanced screening of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring". That scenario seems tailor-made to completely destroy him.

I'm glad I remember that Ben and Jerry bit Stephen and Fallon are talking about. I would love to know what this whole explanation sounds like to someone who does not remember the whole "best friends" late night "wars" of the time. Here's the bit btw. (Your daily reminder that the CC website sucks ass.)

I forgot Fallon started his show two weeks before Seth. I must have completely blanked out how quickly all of those hosts changed in 2014 (and then John starting the same year).

I'm with John on this one, "Allen key" makes waaaaaay more sense than "Allen wrench". It's a fucking key! The amount of shit I've had to put together with those goddamn things, it's not a wrench at ALL.

One thing I learned today: chairs are very serious business for most of the hosts. Fallon keeps a chair backstage to see how someone will look in chairs on the set, and to confirm that's okay with the guests. Seth, meanwhile, had chairs that John feel like he was being interviewed to be on Seth's show. And Stephen has all different sizes of chairs, to make everyone feel comfortable when they're on the show. (This is where things go predictably off the rails, as Seth then claims he has chairs that get smaller and smaller to keep guests on their toes.)

John's guest are was the most expensive part of his set, and they never used it. Somehow that doesn't surprise me. I was shocked they have a guest booker, though. (Stephen: "Wow what a cushy gig!")

Kimmel's live show ceased being live when Thomas Jane said "fuck" nineteen times on air and affiliates/censors were mad. Apparently on network you CAN technically say anything past ten p.m., according to Kimmel, but that's not the reality of the situation.

Seth: "People forget about the early 2000s. If you were a sports fan, you would often say, 'I wonder who won the big game... let's watch the Kimmel monologue.'" This is exactly what the 2000s were like, kids.

Seth and Fallon both were told by SNL showrunner Lorne Michaels that it would take them 18 months to get comfortable with their shows and figure out how to use them. Seth definitely felt that was wrong and he'd only take 6 months... but the first time he started the show from behind his desk was almost 18 months to the day from his first episode.

Stephen has an unaired 3-minute opening credits sequence that he wants to show on his last episode if possible. John also had a longer title sequence that he loved, but that his producer said he'd be constantly going over for time and he'd need to cut it down, lest he get continually furious over not having enough time for his actual show.

Fallon talks about how his first interview was with notoriously reticent and quiet Robert DeNiro, who gave Fallon one-word answers for literally everything. John asks if anyone told him he was starting from a high difficulty degree, but is interrupted by Stephen remembering a Space Train sketch in the middle of Fallon's interview featuring DeNiro.

Stephen remembers more about Fallon's show than Fallon does, which is wild. Stephen probably remembers more about everyone's show than they do, based on the first two episodes.

Stephen calling The Colbert Report "a totally different beast and maybe doesn't even fit in this conversation" made me sad. Tell me all the Report gossip!!!

Stephen telling the story of how he made the Public Access Show for Monroe, Michigan prior to doing late night is incredible. I remember watching him and Eminem do that show the day the internet became aware of it, and it is just a fascinating bit of transitional Colbert work. Also, had no idea they took over a real show... or that they got almost 0 viewers for it, lol. Here's the link to the bit, for your viewing pleasure:

Fallon must realize that John has said literally nothing for a while, because he asks how the first episode of Last Week Tonight went. John actually talks about hosting The Daily Show for three months. He says he'd never interviewed anyone before then (I'm guessing he means that as in "I've never interviewed someone seriously and with the eye of not taking the piss out of them", because he'd done MANY filmed interviews for correspondent pieces before then) and talks about the episode where the power was cut. They taped the episode on a camcorder and had to feed it to Comedy Central through Stephen's office.

Stephen then talks about how his first episode almost doesn't make it to air because it couldn't be exported from Avid. Everyone in the editing bay insists this is fine, and it did end up being fine, but the contrast between how CBS editing works and John having to go to another office to feed a show to Comedy Central is so interesting.

Stephen also kicked down a door after this. Please enjoy this mental image, you freaks.

John and Stephen sharing a bitter laugh over John's joke about Les Moonves in the background is fantastic.

John is the first person to bring up that Ryan Reynolds turned around Wrexham the team AND the city. I really should watch that show.

We now return to Last Week Tonight, which lawyers refused to allow to be live. (Knowing John's comedic sensibilities, I completely understand Legal's stance.) He acknowledges that they had too many ideas going together in the first episodes, including a pre-taped guest. The big thing they learned was that they were doing one show a week, which lead to research coming in throughout the week that undermined their segments, rewriting whole shows on Thursday, and the realization that doing the show that way was completely unsustainable. Having watched those early episodes recently (and I promise I'm still doing that in the background), this context totally explains the franticness and weird pacing early on. Of course things feel more didactic and surface level - they were writing full episodes in two days! The show completely restaffed and changed after year one, and John's "bones were as hollow as a sparrow". He also knew that anyone who didn't like episode one was going to hate episode two, because it was about the death penalty.

Seth's first guests were Amy Poehler and Joe Biden, because they'd been on Parks and Rec together and Biden gladly accepted being after Amy.

Seth's misplaced confidence in his pink eye sketch is very relatable.

Fallon texting everyone that he is basically dying of heat stroke in his room and is trying to leave to save himself is hilarious. Poor Jimmy, he's suffering and getting clowned so hard for it. AND THEN Stephen talks about the opening of Fallon's first episode and all the change he dumped on his desk and him. And Fallon had to run up to the roof with change falling out of his clothes. Again, all this while Fallon is having a heat episode. As John says, "we should rename this 'Asphyxiating Jimmy Fallon'."

Fallon is also vaguely losing his mind and forgets he can talk on a podcast, because he keeps texting the others his thoughts.

They actually address the hosting schedule! Next episode, Stephen is hosting. After that, it's John (I'm excited for the inevitable LMFAO retrospective and/or extensive discussion of penii on rooves), then "James Theodore Fallon".

Thank you for reading this ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE BLOCK OF TEXT I'm so sorry that this is apparently my niche right now, thousands of words on a 45 min to 1 hr podcast featuring five white guys. One day the John pictures will again outnumber my blatherings, I promise.