America has Fallon fatigue

http://www.dailydot.com/upstream/america-has-fallon-fatigue/

Here’s Jimmy!
Fallon’s debut on The Tonight Show in 2014 after Jay Leno stepped down arrived with fanfare. Fallon had been refreshing on Late Night, youthful and ripe with trending music. It was a popular alternative to Craig Ferguson’s acquired taste.

When he first stepped onto that stage, it felt like he was trying to capture some of the magic of legendary Tonight Show host Johnny Carson. His show included “starring” in the title like Carson’s rendition of The Tonight Show, whereas others used “with”; the sketches recalled some of Carson’s bits; and Fallon even brought the show back to its original home in New York City. But Fallon was looking forward.

His staff tapped into social media, and while he certainly wasn’t the first late-night host to do it—Jimmy Kimmel’s YouTube channel started posting videos years before Fallon’s did—he became the best at it. Anything he did on the show got a second life online, and it wasn’t long before Fallon trumped Kimmel on YouTube.

Early reviews were mostly positive as TV writers cited Fallon’s manner and likability among the show's strengths. Even as one of the show’s early critics, the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum, called him “the nation’s most promising nephew.”

“What gives the show its reputation for warmth is the viral elements, those joyful dance contests and lip-synch showdowns, in which Fallon is at his best, laid-back and generous,” she wrote in 2014. “There’s something undeniably ingratiating, too, about the way he has spliced two strains of nostalgia: fondness for sixties talk shows and memories of dumb nineties pop culture (a recent skit featured four separate, logarithmically unfunny references to Sour Patch Kids). But as a host? The man’s a lox.”

Throughout the Obama years, Fallon’s schtick stayed true to what worked. Its most popular sketch spawned a spinoff series. When Colbert stepped into his broadcast territory, Fallon cemented his spot at the top: Just one day after Colbert’s debut, Fallon delivered a double whammy of viral goodness. Until this month, that streak stuck.

The hair ruffle heard 'round the world
Popular and seemingly untouchable, Fallon settled into his show. He wasn’t a political host, but he didn’t need to go there. A few years later, he can no longer afford that luxury.

Like many of his bits, Fallon ruffling Trump’s hair was a lowest-common denominator moment; you figure that Fallon would’ve done it to any other guest he had on. The audience loved it, but at home it played out much differently depending on how you felt about the man who would soon become president. (Reddit’s main Trump hub loved the moment, as well as the subsequent interview.)

Backlash to Fallon arrived swiftly. Viewers and journalists accused Fallon of humanizing Trump and his rhetoric with a viral moment intended to be light; he was further lambasted for not challenging Trump on his policies or any of his lies. Samantha Bee called out Fallon and NBC for their roles during an episode of Full Frontal.

“If he thinks that a race-baiting demagogue is OK, that gives permission to millions of Americans to also think that,” she said.

On the other hand Seth Meyers and Colbert both stood up for him, and Meyers later called for people to blame him for Trump winning instead; Meyers pointed to his role at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner as proof.

“I mean, have you seen my show?” Fallon responded when asked about the interview a few days later. “I’m never too hard on anyone.”

Comedian Billy Eichner was kind toward Fallon in the months after the interview, although he called the moment “naïve and a bit of a slap in the face,” and said that Fallon probably didn’t think any of it through by treating Trump like everyone else in that moment—and might not have been aware of how it looked to other people.

“I hope that he’ll be more mindful of that because Jimmy does have a big platform,” Eichner told Vulture in January. “He gets double the ratings of the other guys. He is probably speaking to more Trump voters than you or I. And I do think there’s a responsibility to not take things lightly.”

Late-night TV's political roots
Some have argued that Fallon shouldn’t be held to the same standards as his professional colleagues—many alums of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show—because he's not a politics guy. (He even admitted in Live From New York, an oral history of Saturday Night Live, that he didn’t really follow the news before being asked to host “Weekend Update.”)

Unfortunately for Fallon, his job is historically political.

In the wake of Michael Flynn’s resignation as national security adviser, many—including one of the reporters responsible for breaking the stories on Watergate—began to draw political parallels to modern times. While Americans in the early ’70s didn’t have the kind of instant access to news that papers, digital media, and cable offer, it was