Time is money. About 90% of the people who go on talk shows these days are there specifically to plug their product. They’re protected by layers of publicists and assistants and people from the studios. They have 1000 other stops to make besides the Tonight Show: they’re on three-month-long world wide junkets. Late night shows have lost too many viewers. Carson had power to make or break. Nobody does anymore. It’s like Ed Sullivan after the rise of rock. He once could dictate to whoever came on on penalty of never inviting them back. By the time of the Doors, rockers no longer cared whether they came on Ed Sullivan. Their didn’t need him to sell records. Nobody needs one particular late night show today, not even comedians. When was the last time you heard of somebody making an appearance and breaking out big? It’s not a community, if it ever was: it’s purely one stop on the merry-go-round.
You can tell the difference when people are there just because they’re weirdly humorous. And they have to be humorous. There are no talk shows; only comedy shows. That’s why Leno’s ratings shot up after the first two years. He abandoned his old format, got close to the audience, started with a 10-14 minute monolog followed by a comedy bit. Letterman has never come close again. The audience wants jokes, and there’s a bigger audience for it than whatever it is Letterman’s doing these days. Or the audience wants celebrities and late night has to put on whatever no-talent flash-in-the-pans are making appearances no matter how much they stink up the joint.
You can’t go back. You can’t even trust your memories. Maybe there was a time when Carson really was all that and a bag of chips (you can’t go back for slang, either) but for years, maybe a decade or more before he quit, he was a hack. There was a time when he did bad jokes so that he could play off them, but his jokes grew so old and stale and repetitive that he needed to rely on those takes, which grew phonier and more obviously contrived all the time. He rode his standard bits into the ground long before SNL was accused of doing so, and they never got newer or better.
And let’s destroy the myth that he was a great listener. Again, maybe at one time. But by the end he was a laugh hog that stepped on everybody else’s lines so that he could get the applause. He stopped listening sometime during the Carter administration.
Carson was almost unwatchable on a good day by 1992. And, given how seldom he bothered to show up at all and how often he just phoned it in, there weren’t very many good days.
He was of his time. That time is no more. I blame the audiences. I always do, and I always mean it. The audiences want this style, and performers know they have to give it to them. Every first guest gets the same amount of time, no matter what they have to say. They must be worth it, after all: they’re famous enough to be the first guest and that’s all that counts.
On Dateline, Carson quoted Jimmy Durante. “How do you know when it’s time to go? When the audience stops showing up.” The audience stopped showing up for talk shows many years ago. And Carson stayed on ten years too long and prevented somebody from turning the show into something new as he had done with Paar and Allen’s shows.
I admire Carson tremendously, I really do. But nobody should get 30 years on a show that accounts for 20% of a network’s revenues. Power corrupts and Carson allowed himself to be corrupted.
Letterman should leave now. Leno has already punched his ticket out. Conan needs to clean up his act: the first half hour of the program stinks and doesn’t come alive until the guests come out. Throw it all out and start over. Ten people will fail before somebody figures out what works, but we’ll all be happier when it happens.
