Shout! TV is pulling back the curtain on dozens of hours’ worth of Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson broadcasts.
The studio behind the free ad-supported streaming (FAST) channel Johnny Carson TV has licensed 50 new episodes of the show from Carson Entertainment Group. The deal paves the way for these vintage broadcasts—many of which haven’t aired in decades—to reach audiences via the FAST channel and multiple streaming platforms. The news was first reported by Vulture.
This new batch adds to a previously licensed archive of 421 episodes—still only a sliver of the 6,714 installments that Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show produced during its legendary run.
Much of that output has been preserved by Carson Entertainment Group on analog formats, which then had to be painstakingly digitized. While early New York-based episodes were lost decades ago, the company still maintains around 20 years’ worth of content—stored, quite literally, in an underground salt mine in Kansas.
The newly added episodes—rebranded as The Johnny Carson Show—make up a curated collection Shout! is calling The Very Best of Johnny and Guests. Shout! Studios worked with Carson Entertainment Group and outside experts—including LateNighter’s Mark Malkoff—to assemble the lineup. The selections span from 1972 to 1992 and feature appearances by icons like Gilda Radner, Mel Brooks, Muhammad Ali, and Joan Rivers, as well as early performances from then-rising stars like Jerry Seinfeld, David Letterman, and Jay Leno.
Shout! also secured music clearances for many episodes, enabling rare performances to be shown in full—including Jim Henson’s Kermit the Frog singing “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green” and a banjo set by Steve Martin.
Shout! first launched Johnny Carson TV in 2020. While the channel has remained a consistent presence, this marks its largest content expansion since 2021.
Other late-night legends have since followed Carson’s lead into the FAST space. Both David Letterman and Conan O’Brien have launched their own FAST channels, as has Saturday Night Live.
The Very Best of Johnny and Guests will be available Tuesday, July 1, on Amazon Prime Video, Peacock, Tubi, Roku, Pluto, and Shout! TV’s website. The Johnny Carson TV FAST channel will begin airing the episodes on Saturday, July 5, starting with a two-day marathon of the newly added content.
Do any “guest host” episodes of the Carson show still exist? I’ve never seen any of them since they originally aired.