While on the ground in Vegas with the Gizmodo crew at the 2008 CES, in-house, camcorder-brandishing Gawker Media troublemaker Richard Blakeley unexpectedly found himself face-to-face with embattled™ Last Call host Carson Daly, the late-night canary NBC sent down its talk-show coal mine long before it dared to force his better-leveraged peers Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien back in front of the cameras.

Confronted with a question about how things are going without his writers, Daly admits that "none of us are happy to be [in a graveyard- shift hell without people who can whip up jokes to make the time pass more quickly]," but sadly refused to take our operative's bait when offered a chance to weigh in on whether Leno's show has been adversely affected by the absence of his own gag-writing staff.