The Tonight Show
The Tonight Show is an American late-night talk show that has been broadcast on NBC since 1954. The program has been hosted by six comedians: Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Conan O'Brien, and Jimmy Fallon.
Besides the main hosts, a number of regular "guest hosts" have been used, notably Ernie Kovacs, who hosted two nights per week during 1956–1957, and a number of guests used by Carson, who curtailed his own hosting duties back to three nights per week by the 1980s. Among Carson's regular guest hosts were Joey Bishop, McLean Stevenson, David Letterman, David Brenner and Joan Rivers, with his final regular guest host being his eventual successor Jay Leno. The practice of hiring guest hosts has been mostly discontinued by Leno and his successors, who prefer airing reruns to showcasing potential rivals.
The Tonight Show is the world's longest-running talk show and the longest-running regularly scheduled entertainment program in the United States. It is the third-longest-running show on NBC, after the news-and-talk shows Today and Meet the Press. The current incarnation is taped from Studio 6B at NBC Studios in Rockefeller Center in New York, the same studio used during the later Jack Paar era and the first 10 years of Carson. During its initial run under Steve Allen, it originated from the Hudson Theatre on Broadway. From 1973 to 2009, and from 2010 to 2014 the show was taped at one of three different studios at NBC's Burbank, California Studios. During Conan O'Brien's brief tenure, the show was taped at an opulently reworked studio on Stage 1 of Universal Studios Hollywood.
Over the course of almost 70 years, The Tonight Show has undergone only minor title changes. It aired under the name Tonight for several of its early years, as well as Tonight Starring Jack Paar and The Jack Paar Show due to the runaway popularity of its host, eventually settling permanently on The Tonight Show after Carson began his tenure in 1962, albeit with the host's name always included in the title. Beginning with Carson's debut episode, network programmers, advertisers, and the show's announcers would refer to the show by including the name of the host: The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien, and, currently, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. In the 1950s and 1960s TV listings publications such as TV Guide often listed the show as simply Jack Parr or Johnny Carson.
In 1957, the show briefly tried a more news-style format. It has otherwise adhered to the talk show format introduced by Allen and honed further by Paar.
Carson is the longest-serving host to date, although he is not the host with the most episodes. The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson aired for 30 seasons between October 1962 and May 1992. Leno has the record of having hosted the greatest number of total televised episodes. Leno's record is due to the fact that, unlike Carson, Leno also never used guest hosts on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno and produced new shows five days a week; Leno himself was also Carson's primary guest host for the last five years of Carson's tenure, adding even more episodes to his credit. Leaving out Leno's five years as permanent guest host, Leno hosted 119 more episodes as full-time host than Carson.
During Carson's first four years, the show ran for 105 minutes and then was reduced to ninety minutes in early 1967 when Carson stopped appearing for the first 15 minutes because most affiliates were carrying their local news during that time slot as they expanded to half an hour. During Carson's 1980 contract negotiations, the show was shortened to sixty minutes beginning that September, where it has remained since. NBC also broadcast The Best of Carson which were repeats of some of Carson's popular older albeit usually recent shows. Prior to the debut of Saturday Night Live in October 1975, NBC aired The Best of Carson on Saturday nights at 11:30 pm. During Leno's tenure as permanent guest host, The Best of Carson usually aired on Mondays with Leno hosting on Tuesdays.
Also featuring prominently on Carson's show was his sidekick Ed McMahon, who introduced Carson and typically appeared alongside him for the entire episode. By the end of Carson's tenure, McMahon usually only appeared in episodes hosted by Carson, and the use of a sidekick in such a manner has not been continued under Leno and his successors.
Apart from the show's brief run as a news show in 1957, its shortest-serving host was Conan O'Brien, who went on to continue hosting a late-night program following his controversial departure. O'Brien hosted 146 episodes over the course of fewer than eight months before Leno was brought back as host, where he served for almost four additional years. Host Fallon debuted on February 17, 2014. Fallon had previously hosted Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and before Late Night he was a popular member of the cast of Saturday Night Live, co-hosting the "Weekend Update" segment with Tina Fey as well as performing sketches.
Hosting history
From 1950 to 1951, NBC aired Broadway Open House, a nightly variety show hosted primarily by comic Jerry Lester. It was unsuccessful because hosting five nights a week burned through all of Lester's material faster than he could create it, so he was given rotating hosting duties for a weekly prime time variety show in 1951. The network scaled back late-night programming to shorter weekly shows. A spin-off, Dagmar's Canteen, aired the following season on Saturday nights; at some other point in the week, Mary Kay's Nightcap also aired that season.The format of The Tonight Show can be traced to a nightly 40-minute local program in New York, hosted by Allen and originally titled The Knickerbocker Beer Show. It was quickly retitled The Steve Allen Show. This premiered in 1953 on WNBT-TV, the local network affiliate station in New York City. Beginning in September 1954, it was renamed Tonight! and began its historic run on the full NBC network.
| Host | Start date | End date | Duration | Episodes |
| Steve Allen | September 27, 1954 | January 25, 1957 | 2,000 | |
| Ernie Kovacs | October 1, 1956 | January 22, 1957 | 2,000 | |
| Jack Lescoulie | January 28, 1957 | June 21, 1957 | 2,000 | |
| Al "Jazzbo" Collins | June 24, 1957 | July 26, 1957 | 2,000 | |
| Jack Paar | July 29, 1957 | March 30, 1962 | 2,000 | |
| Various hosts | April 2, 1962 | September 28, 1962 | 2,000 | |
| Johnny Carson | October 1, 1962 | May 22, 1992 | 4,531 | |
| Jay Leno | May 25, 1992 | May 29, 2009 | 3,775 | |
| Conan O'Brien | June 1, 2009 | January 22, 2010 | 146 | |
| Jay Leno | March 1, 2010 | February 6, 2014 | 835 | |
| Jimmy Fallon | February 17, 2014 | present |
Notes for hosting history
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Steve Allen (1954–1957)
The first Tonight announcer was Gene Rayburn. Allen's version of the show originated talk show staples such as an opening monologue, celebrity interviews, audience participation, and comedy bits in which cameras were taken outside the studio, as well as music including guest performers, a house vocal group and a house band under Lyle "Skitch" Henderson.When the show became a success, Allen got a primetime Sunday comedy/variety show in June 1956, leading him to share Tonight hosting duties with Ernie Kovacs during the 1956–57 season. To give Allen time to work on his Sunday evening show, Kovacs hosted Ernie Kovacs Tonight on Monday and Tuesday nights with his own announcer and bandleader.
During the later Steve Allen years, regular audience member Lillian Miller became such an integral part that she was forced to join American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, the television/radio performers union. She would continue to perform the same service for most of the major talk shows for decades, including those hosted by Paar, Carson, Merv Griffin, and Mike Douglas, among others.
Allen and Kovacs departed Tonight in January 1957 after NBC ordered Allen to concentrate all his efforts on his Sunday-night variety program, hoping to combat the dominance of the Sunday night ratings first by CBS's The Ed Sullivan Show then by ABC's Maverick.
Unlike the first installment of Johnny Carson's tenure, which is lost except for audio recordings, a kinescope recording of most of the first Tonight Show under Allen survives. In this recording, Allen states during his opening monologue that "this show is going to go on forever"; although in context Allen refers to the fact the program is scheduled to run late into the night, his statement has come to refer to the longevity of the franchise.