Picket-Line Crossing Pioneer Carson Daly Under Fire!
Responding to Tuesday's reports that not only was Carson Daly choosing to be the first late night talk show host to cross the WGA picket line and return to work without his striking scribes, but that he'd undertaken a hilariously ill-advised e-mail campaign to organize friends and family into an ad-hoc staff of gag-writing scabs, the Guild announced late yesterday that it was tearing every last TRL-era Tiger Beat magazine cover featuring Daly's smirking image from their headquarters' walls in protest, releasing this statement of Official Disappointment:
"We're disappointed at Carson Daly's decision to return to work. Mr. Daly is not a writer and not a member of the WGA, unlike other late-night hosts Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O'Brien, Craig Ferguson, and Jimmy Kimmel, who have all resisted network pressure and honored our writers' picket lines. We're especially appalled at Mr. Daly's call for non-Guild writers to provide him with jokes. We hope he'll change his mind and follow the lead of the other late-night hosts."
As the new shows the embattled host is now shooting aren't scheduled to air until next week, we'll all have to wait to see how he handles the most damaging controversy of his otherwise distinguished run at It's Either This Or I Start Hosting Infomercials About Self-Propelled Vacuum Cleaners...with Carson Daly. Luckily, there's a recent precedent for how to navigate the public backlash of returning to work without one's beloved writers, so we're confident that when Daly chokes up in the middle of babbling incomprehensibly about how terrible being stuck in the middle of such a no-win situation makes him feel, somewhere, a graveyard-shift security guard will look up at a television that only gets passable reception when tuned to NBC, consider the heartfelt words provided for Daly by a compassionate soul in his AOL address book, and tear up in sympathy.
