Maureen Callahan says Carson Daly drinking beer from his shoe shows morning TV is dying

Carson Daly did not merely have a beer on morning television, according to Maureen Callahan. He turned his shoe into a pint glass on Today, and Callahan’s diagnosis was instant: this is why mainstream TV is dying.

On The Megyn Kelly Show, Callahan framed the whole complaint through an old tabloid rule she learned at the New York Post: the breakfast test. The idea is simple enough to fit on a diner placemat. If you’re asking people to consume something with coffee, eggs, or a bagel, maybe don’t make their intestines file a workplace complaint.

does this piece pass the breakfast test? Could I be sitting there having my coffee and eggs or a bagel and be reading and not feel in any way a curdling of my intestines.

By that standard, Today flunked twice in Callahan’s telling. First came Jenna Bush Hager, interviewing Halle Berry with Hoda Kotb’s replacement Chanel, in a rapid-fire bit where “biggest ick” sounded enough like something else that the couch dissolved into morning-show panic giggles. Callahan’s critique of Hager is mean, no question. It is also very much the point of Callahan as a media critic: she hears one slurred phrase and calls for elocution boot camp.

Jenna cannot pronounce many words properly to save her life. It’s not like it’s in her job description.

The Hager jab is the messy appetizer. The Daly “shoey” is the thing Callahan wants you to remember, and frankly, it is hard to unknow. Daly removes his shoe. Beer goes in. Beer goes out. The shoe returns to the foot. Somewhere, Willard Scott’s ghost knocks over a jar of Smucker’s.

The shoey is the whole argument

A shoey can be funny in the correct habitat: a rugby locker room, a Formula 1 podium, a bachelor party where every man involved owns mirrored sunglasses. On network morning television, it reads less like loose fun and more like a hostage note from a format that no longer trusts itself to be merely pleasant.

This is disgusting and mainstream media wonders why it’s dying. Wonders why. I’m offended. I’m actually offended.

Is a beer shoe really proof that NBC and the old broadcast order are collapsing? Not by itself. Morning TV has always been a soft laboratory for goofy humiliation, half news desk, half county fair. The difference is that the old cornball bits were designed to keep you company. This one feels built to escape the show as a clip, live forever on social feeds, and make everyone type some version of, “Wait, did Carson Daly just drink from his shoe?”

That is where Callahan’s rant has teeth. Her complaint is not that Today got too edgy. It is that the show’s idea of being alive now looks exactly like desperation wearing a sock damp with lager. The breakfast test used to mean easy going down. This is content that asks to be spat out.

I definitely would rather be offended than bored, but then I take a look at something like that and I’m like, I truly don’t know. I think I’d prefer to be bored.