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As you may have already heard, CBS is expected to announce that Scottish actor Craig Ferguson will host The Late Late Show. It'll be hard for us to muster up enthusiasm for a new host we've never heard of for a show we've never watched, but we are sad that Michael Ian Black won't be filling the venerable seat vacated by Craig Kilborn earlier this year.

If anyone deserved to break out of the Nielsen-deprived confines of basic cable into the slightly roomier Nielsen-deprived confines of post-12:30 AM network TV, it was Black. Especially since he lobbied so hard for the job to the thousand or so editors, poets, and comic book aficionados who read McSweeneys.net. As he wrote last month in "On Being a Candidate to Take Over a Late-Night Network Talk Show":

The truth is, there are very few people qualified for this job. For one thing, you have to be a celebrity. Fortunately, I am (very famous). Also, you've got to know everything about everything. Luckily, I do...

On top of all of that, you have to be able to carry on witty banter with all kinds of people: soap-opera actresses, precocious children, British people (the worst). Again, this is not a problem for me. I am well-known for being a sparkling conversationalist in the tradition of Dorothy Parker, who I am told said some truly fucked-up shit.


Oh, Michael! Your tongue-in-cheek wordplay and accessible literary name-dropping can't hide your pain. First you lose that awesome gig as the Pets.com sock puppet, and now this. It's all right to cry, man.

Hey, maybe you can replace Dan Rather?
Scottish Actor Said to Be Choice as Next 'Late Late' Host on CBS [NYT]
On Being a Candidate to Take Over a Late-Night Network Talk Show [McSweeneys]