The Tomorrow Show
The Tomorrow Show is an American late-night television talk show hosted by Tom Snyder that aired on NBC in first-run form from October 1973 to December 1981, at which point its reruns continued until late January 1982.
Straddling the line between news and entertainment and airing immediately following The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, notable guests of Tomorrow throughout its eight-year run included Ken Kesey, Charles Manson, Spiro Agnew, Harlan Ellison, Alfred Hitchcock, Jimmy Hoffa, Sterling Hayden, David Brenner, and James Baldwin. Unique and often revealing one-on-one exchanges were the program's staple. Since Johnny Carson had mostly abandoned the highbrow, intellectual guests that were common in the early years of his Tonight Show while it originated from New York City, many of those types of guests—such as social satirist Mort Sahl, actor-activist Marlon Brando, and novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand—eventually ended up on Tomorrow.
Musicians that were featured on the program included The Clash, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, Kiss, John Lennon, Paul McCartney, Public Image Ltd, the Ramones, U2, Anne Murray, "Weird Al" Yankovic, and Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics. Los Angeles news anchor Kelly Lange, a colleague of Snyder, was the regular substitute guest host.
History and format overview
In fall 1973, NBC's decision to launch a nightly program after the Tonight Show was prompted by the 1970 Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned tobacco advertising on television in the United States, resulting in a loss of revenue for the network. The thinking was that extending the broadcast day by one hour could help recover some of that income. NBC had already begun programming the post-Tonight Show time slot on early Saturdays with The Midnight Special, which began regular airings eight months before Tomorrow launched; the success of The Midnight Special was a likely factor in expanding programming in the time slot to five days a week.Overseeing implementation of the new Monday-to-Thursday nightly program was Herbert Schlosser, the president of NBC television. Schlosser had also had a hand in putting The Midnight Special on NBC eight months prior and had previously spent years as the RCA Corporation-owned television network's vice president for programs on the West Coast. With a job description involving program development among other duties, in the case of launching Tomorrow, Schlosser—reporting to NBC president Julian Goodman—ran into bureaucratic obstacles within the network and in order to try to expedite the internal approval process, on Goodman's advice, decided to leak information about the planned weeknights program to Variety's television beat journalist Les Brown.
The Tomorrow hosting duties were given to local television personality Tom Snyder, who had been working as a news anchor at the network-owned-and-operated KNBC station in Los Angeles, where his colleagues included Tom Brokaw and Bryant Gumbel.
Some ten hours before the program's premiere, NBC organized an afternoon preview screening for journalists and reporters, showing them a mix of already-recorded Tomorrow segments that ostensibly were to air in initial episodes. In addition to Snyder's opening and closing monologues, the reporters saw his panel interview on group marriages. Slight controversy would soon be raised upon realization that neither of the two Snyder monologues the reporters watched at the preview aired the same way in the debut episode that night, with no reasons for the censorship provided by NBC. The censored brief opening monologue reportedly originally featured Snyder somewhat brusquely and impatiently commenting on the Watergate-related "U.S. vice president Spiro Agnew's resignation in disgrace and the questionability of president Richard Nixon's subsequent 'Dear Ted' letter."
Based on the preview screening, New York Times reporter and critic John J. O'Connor referred to Snyder as "baring a personality that is supposed to be brash and abrasive," while in terms of the show's future, the journalist noncommittally concluded, "Tomorrow could turn into the TV version of those radio phone-in shows that work furiously and boringly at being outrageous or it could give the tired format of the TV talk show a desperately needed dose of life.”
Debut
The show premiered at 1:00 a.m. in the Eastern and Pacific time zones on Tuesday, October 16, 1973 with a panel discussion on groupies as a social phenomenon and lifestyle choice with three of its adherents, teenage groupies Sable Starr, Queenie Glam, and Chuck, followed by an interview with the second guest, private eye Jay J. Armes. Most sources list the premiere date as "Monday, October 15, 1973", because it was considered part of the NBC's weeknight programming.The rest of the first week saw Reverend Ike and Billy James Hargis on Tuesday for a general discussion on religion, cult deprogrammer Ted Patrick on Wednesday, and finally the group marriage episode on Thursday with two different real-life "triads"—one featuring two men and a woman and the other with two women and a man.
Established as more of an intimate talk show, Tomorrow differed from Tonight and later late-night fare, with host Snyder conducting one-on-one interviews sans audience, cigarette in hand, no writing staff or scripted pieces, alternating between asking hard-hitting questions and offering personal observations that made the interview closer to a genuine conversation. It was originally broadcast from the NBC Studios in Burbank, California. NBC's Los Angeles station KNBC, where Snyder simultaneously continued working as the evening news anchor, was also located within the facility; Snyder would tape Tomorrow after signing-off from KNBC's 6:00 pm newscast with the evening tapings usually starting around 7:30 on the same sound stage also used by the Tonight Show. Right after Johnny Carson finished his Tonight taping, crew people would rush in to rearrange the set for Tomorrow. In addition to host Snyder, the Tomorrow staff behind the camera included director and executive producer Joel Tator as well as associate producer Sonny Fox and segment producer Bruce McKay.
As an unproven entity ratings-wise, the show wasn't widely embraced across the network. NBC experienced issues with clearances as many affiliates opted to continue with syndicated reruns or late-night movies, or even to sign-off for the evening instead of carrying first-run Tomorrow; of NBC's then-208 affiliates across the U.S., only between 115-120 carried the show during its first year on the air. Perhaps as a gauge to measure the program's national performance in spite of it being cleared in just over half of the country, a New York Times article published in November 1973 reported that Tomorrow placed second in its time slot in both New York City and Los Angeles, the two largest media markets in the United States—in both cases Tomorrow finished ahead of the ABC affiliate's old movie but behind the CBS station's CBS Late Movie block. Though hardly stellar, Snyder's ratings—3.3 and 3.5 in New York and L.A., respectively—were reportedly still an improvement over the viewership NBC had been attracting in those two markets with the news updates and movies mix in the same time slot before Tomorrows launch.
Initial reviews were similarly lukewarm. Two weeks into Tomorrows run, the New York Times television and cultural critic John Leonard, writing under the pen name Cyclops, assessed the new late-night program as "not decided whether it wants to be newspaper, full of headlines and opinions, or a collection of old magazine articles," further stating that "it is neither balm nor shock therapy, it neither entertains nor inspires." Leonard was somewhat kinder to the show's host. Though not rating him quite as high as Dick Cavett, the writer gave Snyder the nod over other popular American talk show hosts of the day: " editorializes with his face—he visibly seethes with opinions—and that is preferable to being permanently dumbfounded, like Merv Griffin, or vaguely resentful, like Johnny Carson, or slightly lobotomized, like David Susskind."
Making the new late-night show work financially became a challenge for NBC due to extremely low prices for commercial spots that a program at 1 a.m. could command. Since, according to Snyder, a 30-second spot on the show brought in only US$3,000, the network's primary concern initially was cutting production and distribution costs. As satellite transmission was only used for rare special events at the time, the show was sent from coast to coast over the terrestrial microwave facilities of AT&T Long Lines and it reportedly took NBC the entire first year of Tomorrow broadcasting before they succeeded in getting lower usage tariffs from AT&T.
As decided on and implemented by its director Tator and host Snyder, the show featured distinct visuals during interviews such that, as the conversation progressed, extreme closeup shots of the speaker's face would be shown. The practice would go on to become one of the show's most recognizable traits.
Topics covered
Although eventually best known for hosting writers, authors, film directors, actors, musicians, etc. for in-depth conversations, on most nights during its first year on the air Tomorrow assumed the framing of a news program with newsmagazine-type generalized panel discussions focused around a single social/lifestyle issue or otherwise interesting topic. These included illegitimate children, UFO sightings, suicide, male prostitution, pickup artists, child abuse, race and intelligence, film censorship, bisexuality, witchcraft, Vietnamese orphans fathered by U.S. soldiers, consumerism, lives of single persons, exorcism, police brutality, transsexuals, Bermuda Triangle, gambling, Catholicism in U.S. society, professional team sports, teenage alcoholism, weekly newspapers, trucking, rape, ageing, crime, divorce, cosmetic surgery, etc. as well as on-location shows featuring Snyder's reportages from the Elysium Fields Institute nudist colony in Topanga, California and Tennessee State Penitentiary. It also hosted somewhat unusual and atypical guests for the corporate-owned nationally-televised American network talk-shows such as sixteen-year-old spiritual leader Guru Maharaj Ji, authoritative Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser, Playgirl editor Marin Milan, actress Sue Lyon who had just married an imprisoned convict, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana David Duke, etc. According to Tomorrow associate producer Sonny Fox, the decision to often go after the unconventional, borderline bizarre content was made in part due to the 1 a.m. time slot—with the show's producers feeling that the audience staying up that late would be receptive to a slightly odd subject matter; the decision also had to do with the strict guidelines set by Carson's Tonight Show whose host and producers wanted to ensure that newly-launched Tomorrow has no overlap with their show, limiting its showbiz-adjacent pool of guests to those Carson is not interested in hosting.Furthermore, being launched in the middle of Watergate, Tomorrow devoted many episodes during its first year to the discussion of this major political scandal in the United States, including having some of its protagonists as guests such as United States Attorney General John N. Mitchell's wife Martha Mitchell. Over the coming years, many of the players in and around the scandal—former U.S. Vice President Spiro Agnew, special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, and U.S. President Richard Nixon's political operatives/advisors Donald Segretti, Charles Colson, and Jeb Stuart Magruder—would end up coming on as guests.
Early into its second season on the air, in late September 1974, it was announced the show would be moving to New York City in December 1974. Primary consideration for the move was transferring Snyder—top-rated local evening news anchor in L.A.—to the WNBC-TV evening news anchor job in New York in order to improve the local newscast's sagging ratings.
The last show from L.A. before moving to New York featured Johnny Carson as Snyder's guest for the entire hour on Thursday, November 28, 1974. Well known for his private nature and distant attitude toward the press, the interview features forty-nine-year-old television star Carson looking back on his 1962 start on Tonight, apprehensions about succeeding Jack Paar, and initial decision not to make big changes from Paar's program as well as discussing his focus on comedy and avoidance of using his Tonight as a "sounding board" for political opinions.