Too Much TV: Your TV Talking Points For Thursday, February 17th, 2022
You don't think of Jimmy Fallon as someone who'd be involved in a possible sexual scandal. And yet....
Here's everything you need to know about the world of television for Thursday, February 17th, 2022.
THE BIGGEST POTENTIAL SCANDAL YOU PROBABLY HAVEN'T HEARD ABOUT
I've written a bit in the past about the lawsuit Jane Doe Vs. NBCUniversal. The lawsuit alleges that comedian Horatio Sanz groomed and sexually abused her 20 years ago, when she was 15 to 17 years old and he was a cast member on Saturday Night Live in his early 30s. The lawsuit alleges there is substantial corroboration that includes contemporaneous emails as well as text messages Sanz sent to Jane Doe in 2019 apologizing for his conduct. There are also allegations that everyone at the show, including Jimmy Fallon and Lorne Michaels, saw what was happening and did nothing to stop it.
The Daily Beast's Laura Bradley just posted an interview with Jane Doe and it's notable not only because of the seriousness of the charges. But it's also one of the few major pieces of reporting that has come out of this lawsuit, despite (or more likely, because of) the number of now high-profile figures that have some connection to the story:
Jane allegedly became a regular guest of Sanz’s at cast parties, where according to her lawsuit, SNL staff and performers observed her drinking and consuming drugs despite being underage. (She remembers Fallon once counseled her on the SATs and on another occasion suggested a college she might attend.) During their two decades of acquaintance, Jane says Sanz positioned himself as both an older brother figure and a sexual mentor. In multiple interviews with The Daily Beast, she recalled him telling her she was “SO COOL” for her age and asking for photos—requests that became increasingly explicit over time as Sanz allegedly used comedy to steer their conversations toward sex, according to the lawsuit.
When news first broke of her lawsuit, Jane felt dismayed by the way her complaint had been characterized. Most coverage seemed to focus on the lurid details surrounding her interactions with Sanz rather than the broader culture at SNL that allegedly allowed his behavior to go unchecked. Sanz, she points out, is one of two defendants in her case: “The first defendant is NBC."
This was also the era when Tracy Morgan was hosting some infamously graphic after-show parties and the cast during this period included Ana Gasteyer, Darrell Hammond, Chris Kattan, Tracy Morgan, Chris Parnell, Molly Shannon, Rachel Dratch, Tina Fey, Jerry Minor, Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler, Dean Edwards, Seth Meyers, and Jeff Richards.. The writing staff included Robert Carlock, Jim Downey, Steve Higgins, and Michael Schur. And then there is Jimmy Fallon, who is mentioned multiple times in the lawsuit:
By the fall of 2001 the plaintiff was allegedly a regular on Sanz's afterparty guest list. At these parties she drank alcohol and interacted with other SNL luminaries. At one point she sat and drank a Budweiser beside Jimmy Fallon, who asked her what she planned to study in college. ("The people seated at the table became very quiet when Plaintiff disclosed she was a junior in high school.") Fallon introduced her to Lorne Michaels, who asked her about her fan site devoted to Fallon. At a party at another cast member's loft, Sanz allegedly digitally penetrated her in full view of other NBC employees, one of whom asked him, "Are you fucking serious?" At an afterparty the next week, which Fallon and Sanz let her into, she allegedly drank alcohol while chatting with then-executive producer Mike Shoemaker, who currently produces Late Night with Seth Meyers. She was 17.
There are also these comments, which allege that Fallon was well aware of Sanz's grooming efforts:
On multiple occasions, Jane emphasized that the hardest aspect of her experience to stomach is the knowledge that Fallon, her one-time idol and arguably Sanz’s closest colleague, witnessed so many of her and Sanz’s interactions. The two shared an office at 30 Rock for years and first established contact with Jane in a joint email sent to her from an NBC account, according to the lawsuit.
“I don’t know how many people knew that Horatio was sexting me regularly,” she says. “I don’t know how much of our conversations happened when he was in his office at NBC, which he shared with Jimmy Fallon… But I know that I deserve to know.”
Bradley also spoke to two friends of Jane Doe, who verified her allegations. And in fact, one of her friends had some troubling interactions of her own:
Katherine also allegedly had a troubling experience of her own at the SNL party. She claims that a high-profile SNL cast member sat next to her, began rubbing her leg, and called her beautiful, an allegation also made in Jane’s lawsuit. She recalls getting up immediately and walking away, filled with a mixture of confusion and adolescent glee. “I look back now and I’m like, ‘Why would any famous person entertain us?’” Katherine says. “‘Why would they even give us the time of day?' And it’s because they were predatory.”
At the time, Katherine recalls it felt as though she and Jane had “somehow got in secretly or it was just something that we were lucky enough to experience.”
“And now looking back, I will say that they knew what they were doing,” she says. “They knew it was inappropriate. 30-some, 40-some-year-old men know that I look nothing… I looked like a baby at 17.”
Given the amount of evidence that appears to exist connected to the allegations and the number of high-profile comedians who could be brought into the case, I can't imagine that it won't be settled out of court with NDAs signed by all parties. NBCUniversal can take the hit over Sanz's behavior. It can't afford a high-profile lawsuit that involves Jimmy Fallon and other high-profile SNL cast members. Whatever the company has to pay, executives will likely feel that the cost is worth it.
REST IN PEACE P.J. O'ROURKE
There are certain writers who possess such a powerful worldview and impressive skills that they don't just inspire you. They offer the possibility that if you work hard enough, if you can muster some snippet of their talent, then you too can be a journalist. Lester Bangs showed me what it meant to be a critic, Mike Royko encouraged me to never forget my working class roots and Bob Greene was the master of insightful profiles. And then there was P.J. O'Rourke, a humorist who had a range as wide as the plains of Wyoming. He was the epitome of the old-school conservative movement of the 1990s - he had his core beliefs, but he treated both sides with the same level of cutting contempt:
We had a choice between Democrats who couldn’t learn from the past and Republicans who couldn’t stop living in it, between Democrats who wanted to tax us to death and Republicans who preferred to have us die in a foreign war. The Democrats planned to fiddle while Rome burned. The Republicans were going to burn Rome, then fiddle.
Matt Labash has a much better profile of P.J. than I could possibly crank out and he had the added good fortune of being his friend:
With Mike Kelly now dead, and P.J. long-departed from Rolling Stone, his Atlantic contract hadn’t been renewed. Nursing a tumbler full of watered-down scotch, he stated it plainly, “I’ve been fired.” His lovely wife, Tina, protested, trying to buck him up: “No you weren’t, they just didn’t renew your contract.”
“Yeah,” he said, ‘That’s called being fired.”
I tell you this not to embarrass P.J., posthumously. Nor to show how utterly bankrupt and bereft the journalism industry is that someone of his talent could be that underappreciated. (Though it is. I tossed and turned all that night in his guest room, figuring that if the legendary P.J. O’Rourke could be treated that way, we were all in trouble.) He wrote plenty of books and magazine journalism afterwards, including for The Atlantic, who seemed to have second thoughts. But I tell you this to demonstrate how human he was. His humanity wasn’t an add-on. It was an essential part of his writing formula. How many disposable journalism pieces do we still read from the 1980s or 1990s or even from a year ago? And yet, you pick P.J. up from any period during which he wrote anything, and it still works. You’re still in on his joke. He didn’t just laugh at people, he laughed with them. Even when playing the put-down artist, he smiled it, instead of snarled it. This is what he taught me, even if he didn’t try to. He invited people along for the ride. As if he was saying, “Aren’t we all ridiculous? Let’s not take ourselves too seriously.” And so even if you were the one getting filleted, you didn’t mind so much in P.J.’s skillful hands. But being trenchant without being angry put him grossly out of step with what’s happening now, when even the funny people have grown deadly serious, as everyone chooses up culture-war sides.
It's a wonderful piece that any writer would feel honored to have written about them, so go read the entire thing:
ABOUT THAT WARNERMEDIA/DISCOVERY MERGER
The latest piece from Entertainment Strategy Guy focuses on the soon-to-close WarnerMedia/Discovery merger and what it means for other big media mergers moving forward. He has a bit to say about the possibility of Paramount Global selling itself off and his thoughts track pretty closely with what I've been saying about the topic:
ViacomCBS – Potential seller
The key question here: To who? I still think ViacomCBS doesn’t really fit with other entertainment conglomerates. Disney and Comcast own broadcast channels, so they’d have to spinoff CBS in a merger. While regulators let WB-Discovery happen, I doubt they’d let ViacomCBS join that party. Netflix could buy it—probably should have back in the day—but joining these two entities would be culture shock of the highest order. And Shari Redstone would have to accept nearly all Netflix stock to make it happen. Plus, what would happen to Paramount+? Frankly, I think ViacomCBS is just too expensive to make a deal easy. But not impossible.
Along those lines, I got a lot of feedback over my comments in yesterday's newsletter about the short-sighted vision of Paramount Global investors. This is one point several people made I wanted to clarify my thoughts on this:
I would agree that the company formerly known as ViacomCBS was very late to the game and it's a point I've criticized them over repeatedly. And it's also true that they still worry a lot about disrupting revenue, in large part because of the impact it would have on the stock price.
Which is a larger point I would make about mergers. A significant portion of Paramount Global's problem results from the very obvious ambitions by Shari Redstone to sell off the company. That long-simmering goal has led her to chase a higher stock price by executing some very dubious plans. The biggest misstep might have been combining Viacom and CBS, which managed to mashup two very sellable media companies and build one lumbering giant with incompatible parts and a worth that is less than the sum of its parts.
I've also been very skeptical of the upcoming Discovery/WarnerMedia merger and it's a topic I'll save to another day, since today's newsletter is already way too long.
ODDS AND SODS
* FX is at the TCAs today and I'll cover it more on AllYourScreens and I'll link to that stuff in tomorrow's newsletter.
* The first new project coming out of Ina Garten's multi-platform deal with the Food Network is the new series Be My Guest With Ina Garten, which will Garten will invite celebrities and other network personalities over for lunch and conversation. There will be an hour-long version airing on Discovery+, a stripped-down, half-hour food-centric version on the Food Network as well as a companion podcast.
The format of this show reminds me that Discovery should reboot Supper Club with Tom Bergeron, a 2008 series that aired on the long-shuttered Green Network. In that talker, Bergeron brought in a chef who cooked a "green meal" while guests talk about what’s new in the environmental movement as well as just general chat.
* Topic, the streaming service from First Look Entertainment, announced today that the service is now available to customers in the United States on Comcast’s entertainment platforms, including Xfinity X1, Xfinity Flex and XClass TV, as an add-on subscription priced at $5.99 per month. As a bit of background, here is an interview I did last fall with Ryan Chanatry, the General Manager of Topic.
* Amazon has announced that the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will end with season 5. Production on the final run of the series from creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and exec producer Dan Palladino is currently underway in New York.
* Comedy Central has ordered a second season of the Charlamagne The God talker The God's Honest Truth. New episodes will premiere this summer.
* HBO Max has renewed the John Cena series The Peacemaker for a second season.
WHAT'S NEW FOR THURSDAY
Here's a quick rundown of all the new stuff premiering today on TV and streaming:
Dr. Pimple Popper Season Premiere (TLC)
Jeen-Yuhs: A Kanye Trilogy (Netflix)
Marvel Studios Assembled: The Making Of Eternals (Disney+)
Nova: Great Mammoth Mystery (PBS)
Secrets Of Summer (Netflix)
Stuck Series Premiere (TLC)
Swap Shop Season Two Premiere (Netflix)
Thirty-Nine (Netflix)
Click Here to see the list of all of the upcoming premiere dates for the next few months.
SEE YOU FRIDAY!
If you have any feedback, send it along to Rick@AllYourScreens.com and follow me on Twitter @aysrick.