The Tonight Show is no longer for us.
In case you missed it, on June 1st the baton was passed from Jay Leno to Conan O’Brien, the new host of the Tonight Show. I didn’t watch the transitional show, because I was asleep. But there was a time when many pre-boomers, myself included, made it a point to regularly catch the late night program.
The show debuted in the fall of 1954 with Steve Allen as host. This coincided with my freshman year in college. I was a big fan of the crazy antics of Steve and his cohorts, and particularly enjoyed the man-on-the-street recurring routine. In early 1957, Steve left for primetime and the show changed its format to news and entertainment. I stopped watching.
During the summer of ’57 Jack Paar took the helm of the floundering show, but his style and demeanor left me cold. So I didn’t tune in very often. When Johnny Carson came on the scene in ’62, I was working for an ad agency in New York. It’s a late night city, so I often saw at least part of the Tonight Show. And since it was taped at 6 PM, I was part of the audience on more than one occasion. So, I was hooked for the next 30 years on Johnny’s monologue, his characters such as Carnac and Art Fern, Johnny’s relationships with side-kick Ed McMahon and band leader Doc Severinsen, as well as the way he brought the best out of his guests. What a great way to end the day. The show moved to the west coast in the early ‘70s; coincidently, I followed a few years later.
Jay took over the show in mid-1992. He’s a hard-working, entertaining guy who made changes to suite his audience, which was more the boomer crowd. I noticed this when attending a taping early on; of course the ratings already indicated what demographics he was reaching. This may be why I rarely watched the show along with the fact I no longer stayed up late. I did catch Conan a few times, when I couldn’t sleep. His time slot began at 1 AM. Again, he’s a bright, clever guy with a sense of humor that I don’t quite get. But young people love him. So Conan is going to appeal to the twenty and thirty something’s, and Jay is getting a primetime slot starting this fall in hopes of garnering a larger, slightly older, audience for NBC.
It will be interesting to see how the changes shake out, but it’s obvious the network is not programming comedy for the pre-boomers. In the meantime, guess I’ll have to trade in my best of Johnny Carson tapes for DVDs, because he’s still good for a laugh.
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