Jimmy Fallon’s Brain Rot Interview with Sydney Sweeney Might Be Rock Bottom for Pop Culture

“3 Labubus doing the 6-7 at a McDonald’s drive-thru” is about the worst sentence that late-night television has ever produced, and this is the genre that, just last year, tortured us with Stephen Colbert’s “Skibidi Biden” bit.

The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon has long been on the cutting edge of internet brain rot. Years before TikTok and generative A.I. flooded the internet with low-quality, buzzword-laden and overstimulating slop content, Fallon and his producers pumped out absolute garbage segments featuring over-exposed celebrities in some sort of pop culture game show/humiliation ritual. Earlier this week, Fallon showed all those Chinese bot accounts making A.I. Facebook pictures of third-world children building Jesus statues out of produce who the original worst poster on the internet was.

Despite being officially unc-aged, the 51-year-old Fallon recently proved to the Labubu-buying, 6-7-dancing generation that, no matter how mind-numbing and soulless their trends may be, he will always be the king of culture-ruining content. When Sydney Sweeney appeared on Monday night's episode of The Tonight Show, Fallon had her play a round of his game “What's Behind Me” that made us want to step behind a reversing steamroller.

It's almost impressive how, save the articles, every single word in that sentence is engineered to kill as many brain cells as possible. Then, you add the actual, live-action, 6-7-dancing Labubus on the screen, and it becomes the medical equivalent of slamming ten shots of vodka for breakfast in terms of brain damage. 

But that's not the end of it – conceptually, the idea of creating brand synergy between Labubus, McDonalds, Fallon and the Sweeney media machine is such a post-modern, late-stage-capitalist horror show that the entire segment metastasizes into the single worst brain rot bit ever broadcast on television.

For as long as he's hosted a late-night show (and, arguably, for longer than that), Fallon has been on a mission to see how low he can push the bar in popular culture with his attention-grabbing, search-engine-optimizing, high-production-value clickbait. Everyone knows this. But, now, Fallon's obsession with synthesizing all of the lowest-common-denominator parts of our pop culture into one consumer media product has reached a level where we almost have to respect him as society's greatest genius in the field of art-annihilation.

There are so many layers of awfulness to this that it almost makes us forget how hard the far right has been championing Sweeney's career – despite their absolute refusal to watch a movie about a woman competing in a male-dominated sport.