Last week, it was announced with much fanfare that Jay Leno would do a show for NBC at ten p.m. Monday through Friday. Commentators pointed out that it made sense to move what he did to prime time since there have been no hit “ten o’clock dramas”, as they were called, in quite some time, and that it is far cheaper to produce a show like Leno’s, which is a version of live, studio television, than it is to produce a drama which is on film and has the production values somewhat approximating those of a motion picture. A network executive pointed out something else about Leno’s new show: it was not a variety show. Why bother to say that when a mix of jokes and music and interviews on a stage in front of a live audience might seem to serve well enough as an example of a variety show? What’s the difference?

The remark was intended, I think, to be at the expense of Rosie O’Donnell’s one shot attempt, a week before, to revive the television variety show. That tryout for a weekly series seems to have sunk below the waves. That was because her show fell rather flat. Here are some production notes to suggest why her show didn’t work and why the conventions that made the variety show possible are no longer there and so the variety show is, like the movie western, largely gone, except for  nostalgic attempts to revive it, while the talk show, which is what Leno does, is still viable. This is because a genre does not thrive because of its plot line which, in the case of the western is to set a drama in the old or not so old West, nor because of its economics, which started out talk shows because all that was required was a host and sidekick, and a stage with a couch and a desk, and star guests recruited because they were willing to work for because they are plugging a movie or just keeping their names alive, all of these conditions still salient. Rather, a genre thrives on the technicalities of production that add up to the feel of a distinctive sort of presentation. Let’s differentiate between alternative sets of affect producers.

Westerns are just not as blazing as are space operas. In fact, the old ones look more than a bit stately and mannered, longer on the talk than on the violence. The western only put enough violence on the screen to entertain children and to give an existential twist to social dramas such as High Noon. For its part, the variety show doesn’t put much excitement on the screen, only a claim to be exciting, the center of excitement, because politicians and celebrities show up to plug their movies and causes and because the political humor is hot off the presses (even if that consists of recycling Clinton jokes that are now some ten years old). Among the many ways Rosie went wrong was that she tried to generate excitement by claiming to be exciting rather than by doing something exciting.

Rosie introduced a door through which her guests would appear, which was a nice idea because it acknowledged a convention of live action shows, that people just show up, and its way of acknowledging that such events were taking place was a bit of artificiality that was humorous because it was so clearly an added level of artificiality: on this stage set there was a prop called a door that would act as a symbolic door through which guests would come. Rosie, however, acted a bit too surprised by the fact that her guests made their appearances as she opened the door. She should have been merely pleased, which would have been a real enough response to people she had seen backstage minutes before and whom she was now pleased to introduce on camera. Ed Sullivan never acted as if he didn’t know stars would appear, and Perry Como was so cool that he took everything as if it came. The only one I knew who made the introduction of guests into a real accomplishment was Jack Benny, who could get away with acting as if the things they said were unsettling, that they were not particularly welcome visitors to whom one must offer some rudimentary courtesy. Rosie is no Jack Benny.

Late night shows, complete with their couch and desk, work because the context is that the real work of the day is over, and you are winding down while watching television, while the point of a variety show is that it is an event that can’t be missed, that something live and immediate and of some cultural importance is happening up on the stage that you have a look at even though you are not there. The only other programming nowadays that attempts that feat, to make itself into a cultural event, are the award ceremonies, which are legion, each one of them proclaiming that you can’t miss this performance by an artist who is the momentary toast of the town, their award as best something proving it, and so you have been present at a set of categorical coronations, one for best popular song, one for best rhythm and blues number, and so on, as if this were information worth storing away, like the names of the Presidents of the United States, whether or not any in the audience actually bother to do so. This is the aura into which is set a series of more or less straight performances that are memorable at least until the next commercial and interspersed with patter as inane as is to be found in old variety shows.

The main error in crafting the awards programs, as well as the Rosie show, what accounts for their failure to achieve the watchability of the variety show, are technical matters. There is, first of all, no curtain to open and give a sense of a theatrical event; there is no curtain to serve as the backdrop for the repartee of the host and the guest. Losing the curtain takes away the sense that you are in the world of theatre, a community where everyone knows who is in town in from the left coast and so available for the variety show, and where an appearance is an event in the life of show business rather than just another gig for the artist. Andy Williams used the curtain less than his predecessors, but his sets gave away that they were sets rather than his real living room, and so you still knew he was doing theatre.

There is another production matter that might seem only minor but goes to the heart of what made a variety show a variety show. The old variety shows needed a lot of bright lighting because of the technical requirements of the television cameras. So the stages were overlit, which meant that there were shadows only when a production number required it. The brightness of the arena contributed to the glamour of the program. Rosie, however, was all in dark tones or negative space. The acrobats and jugglers looked like they were out of Circus Soleil, trying to be arty and tell a story, rather than just being acrobats and jugglers. That created much too heavy a tone for a variety show.

A third production matter of significance is that both Rosie’s show and the awards ceremony shows use too much quick cutting. That is also the result of a technical improvement. There are more cameras available than was true of the three camera set up of the great age of the variety show in the Fifties and the Sixties. Yet the inability of the camera to stay in place or do a slow pan of a scene while a singer croons means that there is little intimacy or emotional build up created in the three or four minutes a number may go on. It is amazing to remember how artists of the earlier era were able to turn the time between Ed Sullivan’s introduction and the time he shook their hand after a performance into a moment that had some emotion tied to it that was other than that of the program itself. You cared about the song. It is difficult to care about the songs on awards shows, including the Academy Awards. They are there to be watched as examples of prize songs or to remind you of when you have heard these songs at leisure, rather than as aesthetic moments that change your emotions, ever so briefly. (The songs on American Idol also lack their moments of truth, though that is largely because the singers are not very good, not because of sandwiching in the songs between judge-like patter.)

Could dealing better with the mechanics have saved Rosie’s variety show? I am not sure, even though she tried to make gay jokes just the way older comedians did a variety of ethnic jokes. I would hope so even though there are broadcast executives who know their markets and so have other reasons for thinking the variety show can’t be revived. Remember that the variety shows prospered when Italians and Jews and Irish were just moving into the middle class and everybody shared the love of Barbra Streisand and Liza Minelli and Henny Youngman because this was an easy entry point into the world of those who had made it. This is a point developed at great and profound length by Woody Allen in Radio Days: the stars on the radio are the stars in the sky by which we steer our courses. You just had to read gossip columns to follow the lives of those you liked to consider important, given your lack of entry into the world of doctors and lawyers except by courtesy of television programs that at one time attempted to give you a sense of what the work was like rather than make hospitals and courts settings for violence and shouting.

What is interesting about African American and Hispanic culture is that it is more insular: not a way into America, but outposts of a separatist culture, however much cross over stars dominate media, ever since the coming of Sidney Poitier and Bill Cosby, and however much black culture reaches its audience through the same mass media of television and movies that everyone else also patronizes. Maybe there is no longer any great need for the variety show as a transitional culture, making your family, in the person of your children, ready for the America of the rock concert, or for a cultural story that is not about show business. The drama of the inclusion of Black Americans is now played out on the much larger stage of national politics.

Korean and other variety shows are for niche markets. They are variety shows with casts of hundreds and large production numbers. The hosts banter in the same genial way as old time variety show hosts did and it comes across as that even without the benefit of translation. Yet the foreign language variety shows are unlike the British sitcoms that are easily translated into American even though British humor is much more arch and less sentimental than American humor. Asians are too small a market to draw a national audience even though Jewish comedians made it big with a national audience which was obviously composed of far more than Jews. I can hardly believe that language is the problem. There are doubtless Asian emcees and performers who can speak English. What happened, however, when a popular Hispanic show host tried to do her show in English was that it flopped. Maybe the Rio Grande is just as wide as the Pacific, while Eastern European humor appeals in a country whose culture and people largely came from Europe.

A different answer may be that African Americans want to be Americans right now while European originated ethnic groups were willing to wait a generation or so and therefore could celebrate their transitional generations, which were not that many, Molly Goldberg’s parents just off the boat. African Americans have waited offstage much too long to appreciate their transitional generations as other than brave in sustaining themselves through their ordeal. I still have some hopes, though. I am still waiting for Hispanic Americans to break through as the glamorous ethnic group for a time, the way Jews and African Americans were. I thought Gloria Estaban would create a grand variety show, and yet she did not become the Hispanic Dinah Shore. It remains the case that culture does not unfold at the pace or in the way cultural analysts, at their own risk, predict they will.