Jimmy Pardo interviews famous people (and Levi Johnston) for GQ.com
Jimmy Pardo is a great interviewer, and would be the best talk show host on television if he actually had his own TV talk show. I talked to him about it last year:
SK: I read that your main ambition is, you’d like to host a talk show, and the podcast seems like ideal preparation for that. But, is there something else you need to do to establish yourself, in order to get to the level of, say, a Daly, or a Fallon?
JP: I’ve been doing this live talk show in town, called Running Your Trap, for three years now. The truth is, any executive who comes out to see it thinks the show is amazing and great, but no one is buying talk shows. There’s just nowhere for a talk show to go.
Carson Daly came from being a sixteen-year-old kid hosting on MTV, and somehow stumbled into a talk show with his amazing charisma and wit. With Jimmy Fallon, I wish him well, but he is going to fail. History has shown that any time a famous person gets a talk show, it doesn’t really work. Jay Leno was a really successful standup, but no one really knew him other than standup, and it worked. Conan O’Brien was a great, successful writer, but no one knew him, and it worked. When it’s someone famous – Pat Sajak, Chevy Chase, Megan Mullally – it’s a disaster.
