Circling back to the Tonight Show once again…
I know this is old news, but I was rather surprised to read that Conan O’Brien had 190 people on his Tonight Show staff. (I’ve read that Jay Leno has a similar number of staffers on his show.)
This seems like a huge number of people. Why do they need 200 staffers just to put on a 42-minute TV show? (Half of which is taken up by musical acts and celebrity interviews.) I’m sure that the Tonight Show staff are working hard, but how many people do you need to put on a comedy show? How many writers does it take to write a late night monologue?
When I worked at the Governor’s office, we had a staff of about 30 people. And that was to run the executive branch of a state government with an annual budget of over $4 billion.
Granted, no one at the Governor’s office ever came up with Triumph the Insult Comic Dog. So maybe all those Tonight Show staffers are necessary, after all.
P.S. I haven’t watched late night TV in several years, but my sympathies in the Jay vs. Conan brouhaha were fully with Team Coco. And I hope that the “Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on TV” tour is a smashing success.
