According to numerous sources, Fallon will be taking over Late Night from Conan O’Brien in 2009.

O’Brien, as you may know, will be moving into Jay Leno’s spot on The Tonight Show in 2009, and there has been much speculation on who would succeed O’Brien.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, NBC is expected to make an official announcement on May 12th. The switchover is suggested to happen sometime in January.

One funny bit from this though, again from the Hollywood Reporter:

The move further cements NBC’s late-night transition that also is making Leno a highly sought-after free agent, with ABC and Fox reportedly already circling the top-rated late-night host. Meanwhile, NBC Universal is trying to keep him in the company fold with a new show.

For some reason, I find Leno being a “sough after” free agent crazy. I don’t know what he’d do afterwards, and if he was so awesome now, wouldn’t he be sticking around?

I’ve never liked Leno as I’ve said a few times here, so other networks “circling” the guy makes zero sense.

Anyways, what do you think of Fallon? Will he make a good host?

Let’s take poor Ryan Phillippe for instance, who appeared on Leno’s show last week. Immediately upon sitting down, Leno starts in on the fact that Phillippe played the first ever gay teenager on One Life To Live many years ago.

Up to par with his usual repertoire, Leno makes a few wisecracks, even a Brokeback Mountain reference. And then, to top it all off, he tell Ryan to pretend the camera is his boyfriend and to give it his GAYEST look.

Are you kidding me? It’s hard to imagine in this day and age that someone like Leno would do something like that and think it’s funny. It’s rude, insulting and made Phillippe visibly uncomfortable. So much so, he almost threatened to leave from the embarrassing topics.

It’s lit a firestorm that probably wont go away for awhile and who knows what kind of trouble Leno will get into. His comments led to a letter from Jeff Whitty, which led to another post which led to the beginnings of mygayestlook.com (NSFW).

All the photos on the site are basically people flipping off the camera, which is in essence supposed to be Jay Leno.

The sad thing is, the guy still leads in the ratings and it only proves to me that a lot of people like childish, immature humor compared to more intelligent and witty writing on other late night shows.

I still don’t know how a guy like Leno thinks this kind of thing is okay. He hasn’t commented on the issue at all yet, but we’ll see if he does.

What do you think? Is this crossing the line? Watch the video below.

Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel have already made similar announcements, and David Letterman remains the single late night host to still be trying to work out a deal with the WGA.

Instead of just going back to work with a crappy writing staff and subpar entertainment, Letterman and World Wide Pants are negotiating directly with the WGA to get them the benefits they want in exchange for their return.

Everyone else is just headed back to work, including Colbert and Stewart, both WGA members.

Here is a statement from those two, with a humorous ending:

“We would like to return to work with our writers. If we cannot, we would like to express our ambivalence, but without our writers we are unable to express something as nuanced as ambivalence.�

The WGA on the other side, in response to the news of Colbert and Stewart, had this to say:

“Comedy Central forcing Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert back on the air will not give the viewers the quality shows they’ve come to expect. The only way to get the writing staffs back on the job is for the AMPTP companies to come back to the table prepared to negotiate a fair deal with the Writers Guild.�

Either way, it will be nice to have some of these late night guys and daily show guys back. I can only hope Letterman and World Wide Pants work out a deal with the WGA, since of course he’s the best of the nighttime crew.

Whether or not the writing will be funny and good, it still should be highly interesting and entertaining to see what they come up with.

Source: Deadline Hollywood

This is a pretty hilarious little video by Conan O’Brien, the host of the Late Night show who is showing solidarity with the writers by not continuing to produce his show (unlike Carson Daly) and paying his staff to keep them employed during it.

He’s also growing a beard, as I guess a number of others are doing on the staff there.

The networks are essentially laying people off today as it’s the end of the month, so people like O’Brien and David Letterman are continuing to pay their staffs until at least the end of the year. It’s pretty amazing to work for people like that.

So yes, I know I said I wouldn’t talk much more about the strike, but this video is too funny.

Hope you enjoy it.

Also, if you want to watch another great video of the WGA Strike, check out Jason’s blog…it’s the WGA/Network love story.