Programming History
- October 1962 – December 1966: Monday-Friday 11:15 p.m.-1:00 a.m.
Jack Paar's last appearance was on March 29, 1962, and due to Carson's previous contracts, Carson did not take over until October 1. His first guests were Rudy Vallée, Tony Bennett, Mel Brooks, and Joan Crawford. Carson inherited from Paar a show that was 1 3/4 hours (105 minutes) long. The show filmed two openings, one starting at 11:15 p.m. and including the monologue, the other that listed the guests and re-announced the host, starting at 11:30. The two openings gave affiliates the option of screening either a fifteen-minute or thirty-minute local newscast preceding Carson. Since 1959, the show had been videotaped earlier the same broadcast day.
As more affiliates introduced thirty minutes of local news, Carson's monologue was being seen by fewer people. To rectify this situation, Ed McMahon and Skitch Henderson co-hosted the first fifteen minutes of the show between February 1965 and December 1966 without Carson, who then took over at 11:30. Finally, because he wanted the show to start when he came on, at the beginning of January 1967 Carson insisted the 11:15 segment be eliminated (which, he claimed in a monologue at the time, "no one actually watched except the Armed Forces and four Native Americans in Gallup, New Mexico").
- January 1965 – September 1966: Saturday or Sunday 11:15–1:00 a.m. (reruns, initially billed as The Saturday Tonight Show)
- September 1966 – September 1975: Saturday or Sunday 11:30–1:00 a.m. (reruns, now identified as The Saturday/Sunday Tonight Show; The Weekend Tonight Show by 1973)
- January 1967 – September 1980: Monday-Friday 11:30 p.m.-1:00 a.m.
By the mid-1970s Tonight was the most profitable show on television, making NBC $50 to $60 million ($175,995,000 to $211,194,000 today) each year. Carson influenced the scheduling of reruns (which typically aired under the title The Best of Carson) in the mid-1970s and, in 1980, the length of each evening's broadcast, by threatening NBC with, in the first case, moving to another network, and in the latter, retiring altogether. In order to work fewer days each week Carson began to petition network executives in 1974 that reruns on the weekends be discontinued, in favor of showing them on one or more nights during the week. In response to his demands, NBC began planning a new comedy/variety series to feed to affiliates on Saturday nights that debuted in October 1975 and is still airing today: Saturday Night Live. Five years later, Carson renewed his contract with the stipulation that the show lose its last half hour; Tom Snyder's Tomorrow expanded to 90 minutes in order to fill the resulting schedule gap. Although a year and a half later, Tomorrow gave way to the hour-long Late Night with David Letterman (1982–1993), The Tonight Show remains one hour in length.
- September 1980 – August 1991: Monday-Friday 11:30 p.m.-12:30 a.m.
- September 1991 – May 1992: Monday-Friday 11:35 p.m.-12:35 a.m.
The show's start time was delayed by five minutes to allow NBC affiliates to include more commercials during their local newscasts.
In an onscreen eulogy to Carson in 2005, David Letterman said that every talk show host owes his livelihood to Johnny Carson during his Tonight Show run.
Read more about this topic: The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
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