It's just so sad to read this. I don't care much for any of the other names that have come up lately, but John Lasseter is my hero :(
Everyone's legacy is up for review.
Nobody is safe.
Not even Tom Hanks.
Time to stop idolizing celebrities.
If it comes out that he was also a sleaze bag along with Charlie Rose, Al Franken, Jeffrey Tambor, (along with an incredible family movie director in the rumor circles) I don't know what to think of Hollywood and my childhood heroes anymore.
Tom Hanks, if you have to say anything, do so now rather than later!
yet somehow they consistently booked very interesting guests. i'll give you that, but that's what the show had going for it, not the eponymous interviewer.
He was absolutely atrocious at the actual interviewing part.
He would constantly make stupid paragraph-long statements and then at the end ask “don’t you agree?”, then when the guest started to explain that no the statement was wrong or oversimplified, he would interrupt them and repeat his point again. He was constantly shitting all over guests who he disagreed with or didn’t think were cool enough, telling them they were wrong and trying to get them to repeat whatever he happened to think, even if they were world-class experts on some topic he didn’t know anything about. He was constantly kissing up like crazy to anyone he thought was rich or famous or powerful, in a way that was really uncomfortable to watch (his numerous sycophantic interviews with Tom Friedman make my skin crawl). He never seemed to listen very closely to what anyone was saying: I don’t think I ever heard a poignant or insightful follow-up question in the hundreds of his interviews I have seen. Instead he would often interrupt right in the middle of some complicated interesting thought, and throw in a non-sequitur, jolting the conversation to a new (often stupid) topic.
My favorite Charlie Rose moment was sometime like 15 years ago when he had on (if I recall correctly) Bill Joy. Charlie made some incredibly banal and obvious paragraph-long statement with a question mark at the end, and then looked at the guest, who was just staring at him. There was a long uncomfortable pause, after which the response was, “well, duh.”
If you want to see a stark comparison, find any week where the same guest was interviewed by both Charlie Rose and Terry Gross, and listen to the two interviews back to back.
Terry Gross has big flaws, the biggest of which is how she approaches her interviews much more from a political activist's lens, to the point of being absolutely obnoxious about certain topics or people. There are a wide array of issues I would never want to hear her interview someone about.
The nature of interview shows is that often topics are inherently political (e.g. interviewing a politician, a journalist, an economist, or a political biographer), but Terry Gross is one of the least political interviewers in the media (apart from maybe some late-night comedy hosts who do 5-minute bits), and frequently gets her guests to talk deeply about their lives and families and hobbies even when they originally came to discuss some political topic or shill their latest book or whatever.
She approaches her interviews with careful preparation every time (e.g. she actually reads the books), universal politeness, and close listening, and responds to what her guests are saying with interesting topical follow-up questions rather than sticking with a canned script.
You might be misinterpreting knowing something about the topic (as Rose typically does not) as “political activism”.
I quite strongly agree with you btw. The fact that Charlie Rose is held up as some high standard of interviews should be an inditement of the entire profession in the US because he - compared to actual maters like David Frost, Louis Theroux, and so on - is quite poor.
It was his format that was great, not him.
And unlike Gross, he kept his own politics closer to his chest, which, in combination with everything else, gave him access to everyone.
Who else is out there from a younger generation on the way up? Weirdly enough, like the other person said, the Hot Ones guy is the closest I can think of. Maybe someone from the podcast realm, but it's hard to think of someone with the range and intellect. I guess it will be a more fractious world.
I agree it would be nicer very to have more of that kind of content but it doesn’t make him very good at it - just one of the only ones doing it
I fear that it will be difficult for anybody to re-create this atmosphere and find enough of an audience to remain on air (I was always surprised Charlie Rose was able to stay on air, honestly), and I doubt that anybody will even try. But I believe there are many great podcasts that can fill the void - I'll just have to create my own dark, quiet, distraction free place to listen to them in.