#Lee Fallon | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lastweeksshirttonight · 7 months

Text

I've been recapping Strike Force Five both for my followers who can't access or don't really have time to listen to the episodes, and also for myself to get more comfortable with longform writing, something I was doing as well with reviews of S1 episodes of Last Week Tonight. (I promise I will keep doing those, I know they keep falling by the wayside.) Going into episode three of the show, I know I have to address Jimmy Fallon and his toxic workplace, the news of which dropped as I was listening to the third episode of SFF for the first time. Putting this below the cut, and I'm going to be mentioning toxic workplaces, alcoholism, and maybe getting more personal than I need to again, so trigger warning for those.

To start, every worker deserves a safe, non-toxic workplace. This is the LEAST a company can do for their employees as far as I'm concerned. The things a toxic workplace will do to your mental and physical health are things I don't wish on anyone, and things I'm still wrestling with after being two years removed from one of the worst environments I was ever in. The stories that Fallon's staffers tell ring extremely true, from weaponized HR to cruel, dehumanizing showrunners/CEOs, and crying rooms. I want the best for them and hope, despite the very bad "I'm sorry if you were offended" apologies given by NBC staff and Fallon, that there are concrete efforts taken to provide them with a much better, safer workplace. Those apologies don't give me much hope right now, unfortunately.

The other thing is that I really hope Fallon commits to some sort of treatment for his obvious alcoholism. It's been an open secret for decades at this point - the article dances around it but anyone with even a modicum of knowledge about the New York comedy scene knows this. Again, I don't wish alcoholism on anyone. It's a horrible, destructive disease. But I don't think that the culture rot at Late Night can be fully addressed unless Fallon makes an effort to get help.

I've struggled with excessive social drinking and alcoholism runs in my family. It's almost impossible to get out of that hole until you realize you need to make the change. I hope this is the push to get him out of that hole. This isn't me trying to avoid holding him accountable for his part in making his show so toxic, far from it. This is me, coming from a similar place where I had to work incredibly hard to rebuild my life because of the shitstain behavior I perpetuated while drunk, recognizing someone that needs to do the same work to make things right in some way.

I thought about making this part of the recap for Strike Force Five episode 3, but it didn't feel appropriate. I don't know if I will recap the third episode, honestly, and if I do, it won't likely be for a bit, or at least until I know what the future of this podcast is. Last week, episodes dropped on Wednesday and Saturday, and there's noticeably no fourth episode as of today (Sunday). The part of this that sucks is that listening to the show DOES help the staff of all these late-night shows monetarily, including Fallon's, and I want to continue to support them. (Because it will come up, I do financially donate to multiple strike funds as well. You should do the same, if you're in a position to.) It's, understandably, a mess.

In the end, I just really want things to improve for Fallon's staff. It'll take a lot of work, but it's not impossible to turn things around.

#strike force five #lee's stream of consciousness #jimmy fallon #john oliver #stephen colbert #jimmy kimmel #seth meyers #tw: alcoholism #i may delete this later just bc i don't know if anyone genuinely wanted my thoughts on this #i just needed to get the thoughts out

31 notes · View notes

dynamitekansai · 4 months

Text

NXT DEADLINE (DECEMBER 9, 2023)

12 notes · View notes

heelswrestling · 4 months

Text

THIS SATURDAY!!

16 notes · View notes

rawsmackdownnxtdivas · 1 year

Text

Isla Dawn(c) and Alba Fyre(c) vs Kiana James and Fallon Henley (with Josh Briggs):NXT 4/11/23

#isla dawn #alba fyre #kiana james #fallon henley #josh briggs #brooks jensen #wwe #nxt #kay lee ray

13 notes · View notes

lokisasylum · 1 year

Text

#jimin news #jimin #park jimin #bts #bts jimin #jimmy fallon #taeyang #lee mujin #FACE #Face by Jimin #Vibe #PJM #bantansonyeondan #baby mochi #jiminie

10 notes · View notes

mistikfir · 1 year

Photo

The Big C - 2X05 - “Cats and Dogs” (2011)

The perfect red.

#hugh dancy #hughdancyedit #tvedit #Laura Linney #Lee Fallon #Cathy Jamison #cats and dogs #the big c #bigmake #mistikfiredit

36 notes · View notes

danwhobrowses · 1 year

Text

NXT: Stand & Deliver - Quickfire Thoughts

Before Mania there's Stand & Deliver. This one I've not been as close to following but since I'm watching let's see how it goes

Spoilers for the PPV

Kinda sucky that half the women in the ladder match didn't get an entrance

Zoey's Arabian Press onto Indi was pretty neat, she did a lot of the heavy lifting this match

Jayne's interference, while anticipated, really did take the wind out of the match though, especially followed by NOBODY catching Stratton's dive off the falling ladder

The finish was drawn out, Indi needed help to climb a ladder? I dunno the crowd liked it but it also bodes why Roxanne had to drop

The Italian coded guys at least had a cool entrance

Still like the Creeds, they feel like if FTR and American Alpha had a kid

Italian guys' finisher was cool too

2 for 2 in interference

I've had my qualms with Pretty Deadly, but their skit was pretty fun

Even if I want a good fight I have no idea why Wes Lee would pick JD McDonagh as part of his 5-way?

Dragon Lee's entrance was pretty cool, heavy on the slowmo

Wes Lee having a Rock Lee-esque graphic was cool

That flying arm clash between Axiom and Lee was some Matrix stuff

The superkick catching the backflip was Adam Cole vs Ricochet-value

Dragunov is just great

Trick Williams insulting PD's outfits like he isn't just wearing a lighter version of the sparkly blazer

Gargano landed worse on that suplex onto the chair stack

It did eventually end up a bit of a squash, with Candice getting involved, but the fans enjoyed it

The Way (minus Theory) reunite too

Missed opportunity for Pretty Deadly to name their 'PD exclusive' a PDA

Spooky girls are kinda hot spooky

We've actually got some good tag synergy and psychology from the Hot Spooky Girls

A Gory Bomb/Facebuster finisher is clean too

Dunno what the finish was about, probably need story context but it's still kinda weak

Bron/Melo did not need a ref bump

Can't see why Bron is okay about losing the title after Trick hit him from behind with the belt after he had the visual submission on Melo, kinda weird that, but Melo was the right person to win

Conclusion I've seen people say this was better than Supercard but I'm afraid I'm not one of them. No offence to NXT, they put on a good show, but it's still got the WWE-isms of running interference that is unneeded. Consider the fact that only 2 matches had outside involvement, the women's tag titles and the NA title 5-way and the fact that the Waller match was because they have nothing for Gargano or Candice on the main roster and it's still in the middle.

Compared to the last PPV I watched of NXT it was definitely better, some questionable decisions but I've seen improvement here and there from talent. Think I'd have enjoyed it more if I watched it first and then Supercard, you watch Vikingo defy logic then everything else high flying just kinda gets muted y'know?

Match of the Night: same as Supercard, the 5-Way Best Attire: Melo's LA Lakers attire Best Performance: Ilja Dragunov Best Spot: Interceptor Superkick onto Wes Lee

3 notes · View notes

lastweeksshirttonight · 7 months

Text

We're back with Strike Force Five episode two, which seems to have randomly dropped at some point after I went to bed on Saturday. I enjoy when podcasts just randomly drop episodes, honestly, makes the whole thing feel more authentically chaotic.

I started listening to this while trying to figure out how to draft for fantasy football. I am not a football fan. I don't follow football. I don't know how to do fantasy. I very much procrastinated on that by doing these notes. My team is graded C- by Yahoo btw, which is two full grades higher than I expected.

Notes under the cut y'all.

This episode opens with Fallon talking about how he forgot his show's shirts glow in the dark. Apparently Billy Crystal tried to sleep in one recently and discovered this; John also noted a time when he was trying to get his infant son to sleep while wearing one of Fallon's shirts and saying it glowed "too well".

The audience for this podcast is obviously 30-something office drones like me. I say this because Atlassian is now running ads during the podcast. They must sense that everyone listening to this has it open in tab one while having their task-overrun Jira boards open in tabs two through five. John also completely "ruins" this ad - which was very on the rails for a decent amount of time! - by suggesting that Atlassian sounds like "one of those plans G. Gordon Liddy had to relect Nixon". Fallon also claims Atlassian is the name of his Fortnite character. (I wonder how my boss feels about both of those lol)

Everyone opens by briefly talking about how many staff they have. Stephen has 210, Kimmel has about 180 + 13 writers + a bunch of crew, Fallon thinks he has 305, and John jokingly says he has 500 people before admitting he misses his legal and research staff. He's ready to say things he thinks are true, instead of "things that are legally defensible".

Stephen: "Would you guys be okay if I had a little Casamigos, I got a bottle right here...?" John: "It's 7:30 in the morning, why not?" Seth: "That's like a 24 ounce 7-11 cup..." I'm so glad this is all in an auditory medium.

John is going to continue shitting on whatever alcohol company he shat on last week, and called it "pond water". I am guessing it's somehow related to Bud Light but that doesn't really track with tequila advertising, so who knows. I have in a past life had Bud Light Margarita in a Bag once, maybe John also suffered that unique hell.

If it IS Bud Light John is talking about, I have no idea how Stephen talking about Budweiser wanting him to be the voice for a Budweiser energy drink/caffeinated beer called B to the E/B 2 the E didn't get cut. This was in about 2001-2002, so well before Four Loko, and the ad copy contained things like "your friends are heading home AND YOU'RE JUST GETTING STARTED!" (John is quietly dying in the background the entire fucking time before Googling if it ever came out. It did! Fallon is flatly like "that's illegal" in a completely baffled tone early on.)

We are 8 minutes into an hour-long podcast. Just informing you, in case you were wondering. Why yes I am obsessed/bad at football why do you ask

Kimmel insists that his early seasons - "for the first eight to eleven years" - were the worst of anyone's on the podcast. He said this after talking about, on his show, Mr. T and Jim Belushi hating each other and almost about to fight each other, his cousin doing pillow-fights early on and causing a catastrophe one episode by fighting Lennox Lewis culminating with Anna Nicole Smith falling into a cake, and another pillow fight with Tom Arnold ruining his suede jacket. I forget that Kimmel is partially of the Jerry Springer era, if not on his late-night show then from his other work, and this just really reminded me of that.

Mariah Carey wanted to be interviewed by Seth Meyers during Christmas in a functional sleigh. John tells a story about watching Watch What Happens Live where Andy Cohen, on live TV by himself, said that Mariah Carey was in the building but would not sit on the side where guests usually sit on his show and was desperately trying to fill time. Mariah seems fun.

youtube

If I had to imagine Hell for Stephen Colbert, it would be "having to fill in for a guest on The Daily Show and turning down an advanced screening of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring". That scenario seems tailor-made to completely destroy him.

I'm glad I remember that Ben and Jerry bit Stephen and Fallon are talking about. I would love to know what this whole explanation sounds like to someone who does not remember the whole "best friends" late night "wars" of the time. Here's the bit btw. (Your daily reminder that the CC website sucks ass.)

I forgot Fallon started his show two weeks before Seth. I must have completely blanked out how quickly all of those hosts changed in 2014 (and then John starting the same year).

I'm with John on this one, "Allen key" makes waaaaaay more sense than "Allen wrench". It's a fucking key! The amount of shit I've had to put together with those goddamn things, it's not a wrench at ALL.

One thing I learned today: chairs are very serious business for most of the hosts. Fallon keeps a chair backstage to see how someone will look in chairs on the set, and to confirm that's okay with the guests. Seth, meanwhile, had chairs that John feel like he was being interviewed to be on Seth's show. And Stephen has all different sizes of chairs, to make everyone feel comfortable when they're on the show. (This is where things go predictably off the rails, as Seth then claims he has chairs that get smaller and smaller to keep guests on their toes.)

John's guest are was the most expensive part of his set, and they never used it. Somehow that doesn't surprise me. I was shocked they have a guest booker, though. (Stephen: "Wow what a cushy gig!")

Kimmel's live show ceased being live when Thomas Jane said "fuck" nineteen times on air and affiliates/censors were mad. Apparently on network you CAN technically say anything past ten p.m., according to Kimmel, but that's not the reality of the situation.

Seth: "People forget about the early 2000s. If you were a sports fan, you would often say, 'I wonder who won the big game... let's watch the Kimmel monologue.'" This is exactly what the 2000s were like, kids.

Seth and Fallon both were told by SNL showrunner Lorne Michaels that it would take them 18 months to get comfortable with their shows and figure out how to use them. Seth definitely felt that was wrong and he'd only take 6 months... but the first time he started the show from behind his desk was almost 18 months to the day from his first episode.

Stephen has an unaired 3-minute opening credits sequence that he wants to show on his last episode if possible. John also had a longer title sequence that he loved, but that his producer said he'd be constantly going over for time and he'd need to cut it down, lest he get continually furious over not having enough time for his actual show.

Fallon talks about how his first interview was with notoriously reticent and quiet Robert DeNiro, who gave Fallon one-word answers for literally everything. John asks if anyone told him he was starting from a high difficulty degree, but is interrupted by Stephen remembering a Space Train sketch in the middle of Fallon's interview featuring DeNiro.

Stephen remembers more about Fallon's show than Fallon does, which is wild. Stephen probably remembers more about everyone's show than they do, based on the first two episodes.

Stephen calling The Colbert Report "a totally different beast and maybe doesn't even fit in this conversation" made me sad. Tell me all the Report gossip!!!

Stephen telling the story of how he made the Public Access Show for Monroe, Michigan prior to doing late night is incredible. I remember watching him and Eminem do that show the day the internet became aware of it, and it is just a fascinating bit of transitional Colbert work. Also, had no idea they took over a real show... or that they got almost 0 viewers for it, lol. Here's the link to the bit, for your viewing pleasure:

youtube

Fallon must realize that John has said literally nothing for a while, because he asks how the first episode of Last Week Tonight went. John actually talks about hosting The Daily Show for three months. He says he'd never interviewed anyone before then (I'm guessing he means that as in "I've never interviewed someone seriously and with the eye of not taking the piss out of them", because he'd done MANY filmed interviews for correspondent pieces before then) and talks about the episode where the power was cut. They taped the episode on a camcorder and had to feed it to Comedy Central through Stephen's office.

Stephen then talks about how his first episode almost doesn't make it to air because it couldn't be exported from Avid. Everyone in the editing bay insists this is fine, and it did end up being fine, but the contrast between how CBS editing works and John having to go to another office to feed a show to Comedy Central is so interesting.

Stephen also kicked down a door after this. Please enjoy this mental image, you freaks.

John and Stephen sharing a bitter laugh over John's joke about Les Moonves in the background is fantastic.

John is the first person to bring up that Ryan Reynolds turned around Wrexham the team AND the city. I really should watch that show.

We now return to Last Week Tonight, which lawyers refused to allow to be live. (Knowing John's comedic sensibilities, I completely understand Legal's stance.) He acknowledges that they had too many ideas going together in the first episodes, including a pre-taped guest. The big thing they learned was that they were doing one show a week, which lead to research coming in throughout the week that undermined their segments, rewriting whole shows on Thursday, and the realization that doing the show that way was completely unsustainable. Having watched those early episodes recently (and I promise I'm still doing that in the background), this context totally explains the franticness and weird pacing early on. Of course things feel more didactic and surface level - they were writing full episodes in two days! The show completely restaffed and changed after year one, and John's "bones were as hollow as a sparrow". He also knew that anyone who didn't like episode one was going to hate episode two, because it was about the death penalty.

Seth's first guests were Amy Poehler and Joe Biden, because they'd been on Parks and Rec together and Biden gladly accepted being after Amy.

Seth's misplaced confidence in his pink eye sketch is very relatable.

Fallon texting everyone that he is basically dying of heat stroke in his room and is trying to leave to save himself is hilarious. Poor Jimmy, he's suffering and getting clowned so hard for it. AND THEN Stephen talks about the opening of Fallon's first episode and all the change he dumped on his desk and him. And Fallon had to run up to the roof with change falling out of his clothes. Again, all this while Fallon is having a heat episode. As John says, "we should rename this 'Asphyxiating Jimmy Fallon'."

Fallon is also vaguely losing his mind and forgets he can talk on a podcast, because he keeps texting the others his thoughts.

They actually address the hosting schedule! Next episode, Stephen is hosting. After that, it's John (I'm excited for the inevitable LMFAO retrospective and/or extensive discussion of penii on rooves), then "James Theodore Fallon".

Thank you for reading this ABSOLUTELY MASSIVE BLOCK OF TEXT I'm so sorry that this is apparently my niche right now, thousands of words on a 45 min to 1 hr podcast featuring five white guys. One day the John pictures will again outnumber my blatherings, I promise.

#strike force five #jimmy kimmel #jimmy fallon #stephen colbert #john oliver #seth meyers #lee has strong feelings about allen keys and wrenches #my gif #sang that in my head to the tune of my girl #my gif my gif my giiiiiif talkin boooout my giiiif (MYGIF!)#long post #Youtube

43 notes · View notes