Given the current state of late-night television—targeted by a vengeful, paper-skinned president and increasingly questioned by its cowed network owners—it may seem incomprehensible that a major broadcaster once conceived a new late-night show as the cornerstone of the entire network it was about to launch.
But that’s exactly what happened in 1986, when the Fox network, ultimately the home of The Simpsons, Beverly Hills, 90210, The X-Files, and American Idol, was just a twinkle in the eye of Rupert Murdoch.
The beginning of the Fox Broadcasting Company, aka the Fox network—also once known as “the coat-hanger network” because its stations’ signals were so weak viewers needed coat hangers as antennas (credit to NBC programming legend Brandon Tartikoff)—had everything to do with Murdoch’s overweening ambition to conquer TV.
But that beginning also had to do with a show that premiered 40 years ago tonight: The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers.
Indeed, the linchpin of the strategy to create a fourth commercial broadcast network and compete with the three entrenched in American media and public consciousness since the days of radio—CBS, NBC, and ABC—was capturing a segment of the audience not then in the thrall of Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show.
The idea was to introduce a lineup of prime-time series to that audience after they had first settled into a routine after 11 p.m. weeknights watching a star who had broken through as Carson’s own “permanent guest host.”
That was a considerable burden to drop onto the petite shoulders of Rivers, but she was no shrinking violet. And her arrival definitely made a lot of noise.
The major thing the show is remembered for now is that it introduced a female star into the previously—and subsequently, mostly—male domain of late-night TV.
That and the foofaraw that surrounded Rivers’ exit from the Carson universe, which was nasty, brutish, and short-tempered.
But the start, 40 years ago, was an exercise in truly great and vainglorious expectations. Rivers was given a three-year contract worth far more than she had been making as the regular Johnny sub at NBC. At her introductory press conference, Rivers announced that she had wanted her own show for a long time and said, “NBC should be grateful to me too. They’ve made a bundle off of me.”
She said she would attract guests that she had not been able to book on her second-team Tonight appearances, like Pee-wee Herman and Boy George. “With all due respect for the Carson show,” Rivers said, “they have their image… and I have mine.”
Hers was bold and brassy. It was more than an image; it was her brand.
It wasn’t exactly in tune with what Fox would become, a full-on youth-appeal network which worked well as a counter to the establishment bunch. Rivers was a veteran New York-bred comic, only eight years younger than Johnny.
And the “network” she was the lead-off hitter for consisted of just 80 stations, many on the less potent UHF frequency in smaller cities. Murdoch had purchased stations from Metromedia, which were in bigger markets, like New York and L.A. But in other big cities, issues complicated Rivers’ chances.
Several stations had expensive programming like movies and old sitcoms in the late-night hours and didn’t want to cede that territory to a fledgling network many expected to fail. One station in Milwaukee negotiated a deal to keep its syndicated shows instead of Rivers as a precondition to carrying Fox’s prime-time shows.
The issue in one major market was much worse. Murdoch had bought a station in Boston but could not take possession until January. Until then, the owners, the Christian Broadcasting Network, wanted nothing to do with Rivers’ often ribald material and declined to air it.
That forced Fox to broadcast the audio of the show on a little-listened-to radio station for three months.
Given all that, and the deep freeze in her relationship with Johnny, Rivers never had much of a shot. The ratings, not legendary at the start, slid quickly to mediocrity and finally penury. Fox insisted Rivers fire her executive producer, Edgar Rosenberg. That was awkward because he was her husband—and then tragic when he committed suicide a month after being fired.
Rivers left the show in May, in a finale marked by the guests trashing the furniture and TP-ing the set. Sounds memorable, but few saw it.
The Fox lineup hardly got to draft on a success in late night, as was intended.
But The Late Show enjoyed a memorable coda. With the show adrift, Fox threw on a guest host lineup of oldies and oddities. Tom Snyder sat in, as did Suzanne Somers and Martin Sheen.
But one of the oddest bits of host-casting led to a genuinely significant late-night moment.
On June 12, 1987, Fox somehow scheduled the nonconformist, anti-authority, Dadaist gadfly musician Frank Zappa to host the show. When he revealed his plan to use the show to examine allegations about conservative TV preacher Pat Robertson and the Nicaraguan Contras, Fox dropped Zappa shortly before taping time and brought on a little-known comic as a last-second host.
His name was Arsenio Hall. And he did well. He basically took over the show for three months.
Fox ultimately rued the day it went with a totally offbeat mock-news show called The Wilton North Report and let Hall walk. He was later hired for a syndicated show by Paramount, and many Fox stations wound up carrying it, blowing up what had been intended to be the foundation of its network.
The network survived. Fox tried again—briefly—with Chevy Chase in 1993. But the weeknight late-night boat had sunk for Fox, the network that had started by declaring late night its flagship.
Get stories like this in your inbox: Sign up for LateNighter’s free daily newsletter.
