Pioneers of Television (TV Series) Late Night (2008) User Reviews

It's a solid overview of the late night television talk show...

[planktonrules · 9/10 · 3 October 2015]

This show is from a really nice PBS series on early television. Oddly, however, this second episode is the first one on the DVD for the show.

This episode is about the history of the late night talk show. It begins with a brief discussion of Pat Weaver and skipped over a few abortive attempts to the Steve Allen version of the night show with its free-wheeling skits, crazy stunts, headlines and audience interviews. Then, in a huge change, the network replaces this comic with a pure interviewer, Jack Paar. Paar was strange, neurotic and temperamental...and these really worked in his favor to create an audience. Then, after his relatively brief tenure, the bulk of the show talked about Johnny Carson--followed by tiny diversions discussing folks who challenged him, such as Dick Cavett, Joey Bishop, Merv Griffin and Arsenio Hall.

All in all, the show was a great overview of the subject matter. It skipped a few folk who were of very minor importance--but otherwise it's a great look at the genre.

"They gave us a reason to stay up late."

[classicsoncall · 7/10 · 10 March 2013]

All you need to know about this Pioneers episode is expressed in my summary line; after that, the rest of the review writes itself. The history of late night talk shows dates back to 1954 when comedian Steve Allen was tapped to pioneer this new genre, and in the process, accidentally invented a new approach to broadcast comedy. After three seasons, Jack Paar took "The Tonight Show" in a different direction with his emphasis on the interview format, making small talk seem wonderful and bringing celebrities into viewers' homes in a way that hadn't been seen before. From 1962 on, it was Johnny Carson who placed his imprint on the late night format, and as sometime competitor Arsenio Hall described Johnny - "They don't call him the King for nothing."

I remember Allen and Paar as a kid in the Fifties, but didn't get to stay up late until well into Johnny's historic run. The Sixties might have been a bit beyond TV's Golden Age, but for Carson it couldn't have been sweeter. Carson had this unique ability to deadpan his guests and get them to crack up at the same time, and catching clips of his old shows are a treat to this day.

After catching a few of these Pioneer episodes, I find them to be a mixed bag quality wise. Perhaps understandable, as how can you cram two or three decades of entertainment history into an hour long format? This entry seemed to be a fairly credible history of Late Night TV, even if it felt like a lot of it might have been glossed over. Taken another way, if you spent a good part of your life watching late night TV in real time, a show like this can do nothing but skim the surface.