There’s a big TV anniversary coming up. No, not that one about Saturday nights (though that’s a monumental one, too).
This Friday, September 27, The Tonight Show will turn 70 years old. And it will continue into the foreseeable future—piling up more episodes to a total that already makes it television’s longest-running talk show (with a Guinness World Record to prove it).
So get ready for the big celebration on Friday…
Actually, no. Cancel the balloons. There will be no party for the new septuagenarian on the 27th. Maybe NBC is waiting for a more exciting number, like 75. But the network is not planning any big remembrance on The Tonight Show‘s official 70th anniversary because, as of a couple of weeks ago, there is no longer a Tonight Show on Friday nights (at least not a fresh episode).
That The Tonight Show is running repeats one night a week is really no big deal (nor is it even new to the franchise—the same was true late in Johnny Carson‘s tenure). Besides, TV has changed a lot; maybe more in the past five years than in the previous 65 years combined. All of the other network late-night shows take Friday off as well. It’s just a coincidence, perhaps an unhappy one (though no howls of complaint have been heard across the land), that the anniversary happens to fall on a night when the show is dark.
Nevertheless, September 27 will mark 70 years since The Tonight Show first went on the air nationally with Steve Allen as the host, sitting behind the desk (yes, there was a desk), literally reading the rundown of the show off a yellow legal pad, and wondering how many folks watching would be willing to stick with him until one in the morning.
The show was 105 minutes long then because local news ended at 11:15 p.m., which led Allen to joke: “This show is going to go on forever!” (And so it has.)
It is not grandiose hyperbole to label The Tonight Show the most significant entertainment television show ever produced. And maybe the most-watched. For most of its run it has aired five nights a week for an hour (the 90-minute thing was axed in 1980, when Carson had had enough and used his contract leverage to dump the extra 30 minutes). Some news shows, like its progenitor Today, never had repeats and so were almost surely seen by more people than The Tonight Show; but no other entertainment show comes close.
As for significance: you could assess a lot of American history from looking at old episodes of the program—if only you could see them all. Many of the early episodes with Allen and his successor Jack Paar (who hosted from 1957 to 1962) are lost, as are a shocking number of early Carson episodes (because many were idiotically dumped to make space for new offices).
Partly this reflected the disposable attitude about the show: the jokes were topical and the projects that guests were promoting were often quickly forgotten. Why would anyone what to go back and watch these episodes? It was not like I Love Lucy or something.
It was definitely something.
Almost all of the most famous and celebrated people of those 70 years appeared at some point on The Tonight Show, everybody from George Burns to George W. Bush. And innumerable major stars, from Barbra Streisand to Roseanne Barr, made their first appearances on TV on the Tonight stage.
Of course, the predominance of the show lifted it into a realm often compared to Shakespeare. Carson was routinely called the “King of Late Night” (there’s even a 2012 biographical documentary about the host with that very title). And we know what happened with royal succession in The Bard’s History plays. The period of “transition” from Carson to Jay Leno, memorably bypassing David Letterman, was national news. As was the later do-si-do between Leno and Conan O’Brien.
Things have calmed down since then. Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show tenure is already the third longest after Carson and Leno. (The indefatigable Leno accumulated about 100 more shows than Carson, even though Carson hosted for 29+ years to Leno’s 20 years.)
Fallon—who has spent much of this year celebrating his own 10th anniversary as the show’s host—has also embraced The Tonight Show‘s roots. He brought the show back to New York City (Carson brought it to Burbank in 1972), and he works from the same studio that once housed Paar and Carson (for his first 10 years behind the desk). He also begins every show by welcoming his audience, saying: “You’re here! It’s The Tonight Show!”
There’s still time for Fallon to acknowledge the big birthday on the air—as long as he does it on the birthday eve.
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