Please go home. Don’t go away, just go home.
The thing I have always loved about you is how genuine you are—genuinely moved, genuinely playful, genuinely interested—so when you turned on your iPhone camera and were 100% yourself in quarantine it wasn’t just entertainment. It was the voice of displaced America. We all had our kids crawling all over us while we tried to pull off some semblance of work. We all were laughing and crying at the same time. We all had a time when it hit too close to home and we had to take a moment.
I cried with you when your friend died not because I knew him or even really knew you but because you let me in and I let you in and for a few minutes we weren’t trying to fix or understand the world. We were just sitting in it.
You probably already know what a pressure release valve your show is in a time when almost all the things we do for self-care are unsafe, but it isn’t the same thing in studio. Whoever redesigned your set and put you in cardigans instead of suits is on the right track but it isn’t enough. We aren’t anywhere close to normal yet. I’m still navigating conference calls while my kid is negotiating screen time requests just off camera (they know how to leverage the situation). Your socially distant studio band just makes me feel like I missed the last train out of all of this.
It’s a little odd to have your guests at home and you in the studio, to see their kids running around but miss Winnie’s lost tooth. I’m not as interested in heavily produced bits. I’d rather see you do a TikTok attempt in your…where was that again? You seem to have an unending supply of unique spaces to film in, which was part of the charm of the Home Edition. I don’t have an indoor tree house but I kind of did when I let the Fallons into my quarantine bubble.And, honestly, you may get more laughs from the band and the crew but I preferred the occasional hard-won laugh from your wife and the obvious chemistry when you were trying to make her laugh. I know there are lots of reasons that returning to the studio is better for your work life and your home life but the Tonight Show used to be a bright spot in the pandemic and now it’s just another thing we’ve lost.
Marianne Hales 