The battles for late night
And yet men have always gone to war over late night. The “Tonight Show” is like the Tudor dynasty—from the beginning, nothing but succession troubles. The man who made it all matter—for Leno, Letterman, and O’Brien—was Johnny Carson. Carson had himself replaced a television legend, Jack Paar. In its earliest incarnations, “Tonight” had been routinely clobbered in its time slot by old movies, but in 1957 Paar took custody of the show and turned it into a reliable source of revenue for NBC. Carson’s bona fides were somewhat sketchy. His own variety program, “The Johnny Carson Show,” had been cancelled, after a single season, in 1956. When NBC offered him “Tonight,” in 1962, he was hosting a daytime quiz show on ABC called “Who Do You Trust?,” a knockoff of Groucho Marx’s long-running “You Bet Your Life.”
NBC had considered Groucho—also Bob Newhart, Jackie Gleason, and Joey Bishop—as the host for “Tonight” before approaching Carson. But he was a hit from the start. By the end of his first year, he was drawing an average of seven and a half million viewers, twice the size of Paar’s audience. And the pie just kept on growing. By 1965, the “Tonight Show” was reported to be out-earning NBC’s entire prime-time schedule.
This got the attention of the other networks. The “Tonight Show” was a programming novelty. Most of the early television executives came from radio, where late night had never inspired much advertiser interest. In the nineteen-fifties, some television stations simply played “The Star-Spangled Banner” after the eleven-o’clock news and went off the air. The man of vision in this area was Sylvester (Pat) Weaver, the vice-president and later the president of NBC. Seeing opportunity in the fringes, he created both “Today,” in 1952, with Dave Garroway as the host, and “Tonight,” in 1954, with Steve Allen. (He was also one half of the team that brought us Sigourney Weaver.)
Weaver was a Dartmouth philosophy major; his boss, the redoubtable David Sarnoff, president of RCA, which owned NBC, had never gone to college. Weaver believed that television could be “an enlightenment machine.” He fought against what he called “the robotry of habit viewing,” and opposed giving the schedule over to soap operas and situation comedies, generic staples of radio. He invented the special: his theory was that a large number of people will tune in to a program if there is buzz about it. The theory seemed to be paying off—NBC’s broadcast of the Broadway “Peter Pan,” with Mary Martin, attracted sixty-five million viewers, almost forty per cent of the entire population—when, in 1955, Sarnoff removed Weaver from the presidency to make room for his son. For the next twenty years, CBS, which had no compunctions about stuffing its schedule full of soap operas and situation comedies, ate NBC’s lunch.
The theory at CBS was the reverse of Weaver’s. It was that people don’t watch programs; they watch television. The job is only to have your show be the one they end up watching once they turn the set on. They don’t have to feel good about themselves for watching your show; they don’t even have to like it. What Weaver deprecated as “habit viewing” was just what CBS was looking to exploit. At NBC, the policy was referred to, contemptuously, as LOP—Least Objectionable Program—but it worked. CBS broadcast, in prime time, “I Love Lucy,” “Mister Ed,” “My Favorite Martian,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “The Beverly Hillbillies,” and “The Munsters,” all of them about as dumb as they come, and all of them huge hits. From 1962 to 1964, fifty-seven million Americans tuned in to watch “The Beverly Hillbillies” every week.
Neither CBS nor ABC gave much thought to late night until Carson showed the entertainment world that there was gold in those distant hills. They had been earning little or nothing after eleven o’clock, generally giving the time to their affiliates, who sold the commercials and ran old movies. In 1964, though, CBS and ABC started looking for talent to go up against Carson and NBC. Between 1964 and 1972, a number of men were pushed into the arena. One of them was Dick Cavett.
