What was wrong with The Chevy Chase Show?

[Mahaloth]

@Sigmagirl

If I am remembering the right show, people scorned it because it was sponsored by Doritos. It was a big sellout because a corporate sponsor was paying for a comedy show, so THE MAN would be telling Chevy what to say. Never mind that the Texaco Star Theatre, among others, was a comedy landmark. Not to say that the Chevy Chase show was a comedy landmark, but I do remember thinking, “So somebody sponsors the show? So fucking what?”

I believe you.

Cite?

[Spoons]

@Chicagojeff

I remember Springer doing a serious talk show and almost gettin cancelled before he went total gonzo.

This point may offer some insight. I remember when Jerry Springer was serious (I was working a night shift and tended to wake up later in the mornings than most people, so talk shows and coffee were my morning routine), and he was lost in among the talk shows of Phil Donahue, Sally Jesse Raphael, Geraldo Rivera, Jenny Jones, Rolanda Watts, and Montel Williams. Springer had to stand out if he was to survive. As we know, he did.

Somewhat similarly, Chevy Chase’s show came on at a time when Carson was stepping down and the Letterman/Leno battles were heating up. There were also other late-night talk shows that started around then that Chevy Chase would have competed against: Pat Sajak hosted a show for a while, Arsenio Hall had a show, and as I recall, even Ron Reagan (the former President’s son) hosted a late-night talk show for a bit. Unlike Springer though, Chevy Chase and Pat Sajak couldn’t make themselves unique against Letterman/Leno. Reagan was unique by being rather highbrow, and that’s what I’d guess eventually killed his show too. I don’t think that late at night, people wanted to wrap their heads around the ideas discussed by such people as economists, professors, union leaders, and political analysts.

I’d guess that, if it had no serious competition or a unique hook like Springer, Chevy Chase’s show might have survived. But it had serious, better-established competition, and it was nothing special. Chevy Chase wasn’t a great host, but he could have improved in time. Problem was, in the competitive late-night talk show environment in which his show debuted and aired, he never got the chance.

[Sigmagirl]

@Mahaloth

I believe you.

Cite?

Close as I can find: Doesn’t definitively say that Doritos sponsored the show, but says “Once upon at time in the early 90’s Doritos grabbed Chevy as their pitchman. This was as the hype was building for The Chevy Chase Show.
If I’m not mistaken this is the commercial as it aired on the first episode of the show.” The commercial is then embedded.
http://thechevychaseshow.blogspot.com/search?q=doritos

[Exapno_Mapcase]

@statsman1982

I was thinking about the CC Show as I was watching Craig Ferguson last night. From the clip I saw and the Wikipedia article about it, the show was supposed to be quite different from the standard late night fare, with the basketball hoop, the aquarium, and the other gimmicks. When looking at the Craig Ferguson show, I see gimmicks too, most notably the puppets in the opening segment. It seems just as reasonable that someone would say, “Puppets? On an adult talk show? Really?”, as to find gimmicks like an in-desk keyboard lame.

Craig Ferguson didn’t start using puppets on his show until he had been on for about three years.

That’s the big thing about these shows. They take literally years to find their voice. Ferguson’s big selling point today is not that he uses puppets but that he partially improvises much of his monologue and desk spots. He seems like he’s making up the whole show and is always on the edge of losing control. But in his bio he makes clear that in the beginning, he did a standard joke/joke/joke monologue that didn’t work as well and he gradually evolved this looser style that fits him better. I didn’t start watching until the beginning of his second year. If I started at the beginning I might never have come back.

Conan O’Brien was legendarily awful at first. Jay Leno was stiff and awkward for the first two years of the Tonight Show. Jimmy Kimmel allowed the audience to drink until somebody vomited during a show. Jon Stewart kept all the worst parts of the old Daily Show and took years to get to political message that made him. Jimmy Fallon still doesn’t belong on the air but NBC can’t back down.

Chase didn’t have that luxury. He had been so heavily promoted that everybody tuned in and saw him at his worst, like a big movie opening with bad word of mouth. If he had been on NBC or CBS they might have been forced to give him time, like NBC is doing now with Conan’s lousy ratings on the Tonight Show. But he was on Fox when it was a nothing network and they had no resources and no advertising to cushion the falling ratings.

Was he worse than some of these others at the beginning? Not a lot worse, probably. But he was in a much worse position.

[statsman1982]

@Exapno_Mapcase

Craig Ferguson didn’t start using puppets on his show until he had been on for about three years.

That’s the big thing about these shows. They take literally years to find their voice. Ferguson’s big selling point today is not that he uses puppets but that he partially improvises much of his monologue and desk spots. He seems like he’s making up the whole show and is always on the edge of losing control. But in his bio he makes clear that in the beginning, he did a standard joke/joke/joke monologue that didn’t work as well and he gradually evolved this looser style that fits him better. I didn’t start watching until the beginning of his second year. If I started at the beginning I might never have come back.

Conan O’Brien was legendarily awful at first. Jay Leno was stiff and awkward for the first two years of the Tonight Show. Jimmy Kimmel allowed the audience to drink until somebody vomited during a show. Jon Stewart kept all the worst parts of the old Daily Show and took years to get to political message that made him. Jimmy Fallon still doesn’t belong on the air but NBC can’t back down.

Chase didn’t have that luxury. He had been so heavily promoted that everybody tuned in and saw him at his worst, like a big movie opening with bad word of mouth. If he had been on NBC or CBS they might have been forced to give him time, like NBC is doing now with Conan’s lousy ratings on the Tonight Show. But he was on Fox when it was a nothing network and they had no resources and no advertising to cushion the falling ratings.

Was he worse than some of these others at the beginning? Not a lot worse, probably. But he was in a much worse position.

Yes, I had forgotten that Conan and Jay had their troubles too. As I said in the OP, I was only 11 when the CC Show debuted, and these other shows started at about the same time. I didn’t know anything about the late night wars until I saw (much later) the HBO movie about it. I also forgot that Fox was much smaller then that it is today, and its only real claims to fame were Married with Children and The Simpsons.

By the way, I have come to love Craig Ferguson in the past few weeks. My example wasn’t meant to criticize him but the network execs who were eager to swing the axe on Chase. You’ve made me think that, if he really were given the chance, Chase could have made something out of that show.

[Marley23]

@Krokodil

Chevy exudes more smugness than charisma–his humor comes from a socially superior position, like the boss’s untouchable son-in-law–and while he was in rare form with DeNiro, he was generally not a good interviewer and not able to attract good guests on a consistent basis. He was up against Letterman at his peak form and the earliest Conan O’Brien.

If that’s rare form, I’d hate to see an off night. (And I did watch the Goldie Hawn interview.) Chase asks some good questions but he’s still very uneasy and uncomfortable, and it’s not fun to watch.

[NDP]

For what it’s worth, I think some of Chase’s smugness may have come from a sense of entitlement. When Chase first burst on the scene with SNL in 1975, there was talk that some of the suits at NBC were planning on grooming him as Carson’s successor. (Back then, nobody expected Carson to host the Tonight Show for another 17 years.) I think Chase even guest-hosted a few times in the late 70’s after leaving SNL. Anyway, zoom ahead to 1992: Carson finally steps down and Chase, who has a somewhat successful movie career going, announces he’s going to launch a late-night talk show the following year. A lot of people were puzzled by this news because even if the show turned out to be successful it would’ve still only been at best a horizontal move career-wise for Chase. However, I think Chase never stopped believing he was the rightful successor to the late-night throne and that once Carson stepped aside, he would come in and claim it regardless of how well his movie career was going. Of course, once his show failed, it dropped his stock as a performer so badly that it weighed down his movie career as well.

Incidentally, there’s a interesting parallel between Chevy Chase and Jerry Lewis who, 30 years before, hosted a big budget talk/variety show that also ended up with as a huge career-damaging fiasco.

[iftheresaway]

@statsman1982

If you do ask them, please come back here and post what they said. I’m interested to hear what they specifically disliked about the show.

They echoed what a lot of other posters here have said: he just really didn’t seem comfortable in his own skin as a host. My dad said that he got the feeling the whole time that Chase kept waiting for the guest to set him up and ask him questions, that he seemed like he would have been much happier in the other chair.

[Condescending_Robot]

Late night talk shows are watched by people who are up at midnight during the summer–which, outside of retirees who would never bolt from Tonight, is kids who are off school and young people working irregular hours. Young people in 1993 already didn’t care about Chevy Chase. His big movies were 10 years old, his SNL career approaching 20. Nobody in the opinionmaker demographic would tune in to that show when Conan was on doing avant-garde stuff and getting his early-year credibility among teenagers.