There was something kingly, or maybe princely, about the way he held court on The Tonight Show, bantering with his sidekick and adviser Ed McMahon and his musical jester Doc Severinsen, and making almost everyone who stood on his stage or sat on his couch seem special and delightful, no matter what he thought of them privately.Īs more than one interviewee points out, Carson’s greatest career gift wasn’t his comic timing, which was impeccable, or his knack for self-deprecation (he was funniest when the jokes stank) it was his ability to modulate his own comic energy so that he seemed to complete his guests, amplifying their strengths and neutralizing their weaknesses. There’s a reason they called him the King of Late Night, and it wasn’t just because, at the peak of his power in the late seventies, Carson was single-handedly responsible for 25 percent of NBC’s profits. Carson’s skinny handsomeness, naughty-boy charm, and essentially private nature hit that secret button on the American psyche that craves fairy-tale royalty to adore. There’s something Kennedy-esque (as in JFK and RFK) about archival photos of the younger Carson vacationing with his first wife Jody Wolcott and second wife Joanne Copeland, and not just because they’re black-and-white images that radiate privilege. We also hear from comedians whose careers were made by Carson, including Leno, Letterman, and Drew Carey, who tears up remembering the moment when Carson invited him to sit on the Tonight Show couch.
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All the talk-show hosts mentioned above sit for interviews, plus Arsenio Hall, who snapped up the TV real estate that Carson’s white middle-American sensibility mostly avoided, and Carson’s longtime guest host Joan Rivers, whom Carson cut off when she failed to tell him that the Fox Network had hired her to do her own program. But after that, it settles into a distinctively American Masters groove, painting a portrait of an artist honing his talent and building his influence over a period of decades. Aside from rare childhood photos and home-movie snippets and shots of the salt mine where tapes of Carson’s shows are stored, the first half-hour has no more personality than a clip-job special that you might have seen ten years ago on basic cable. The program takes a while to find its footing.
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When you see him in King of Late Night doing a bit with Jack Benny circa 1955, the clip is presented as a harbinger of the new guard displacing the old, but because the men are framed in a grainy, black-and-white medium shot, they might as well be Union army soldiers killing time before the battle of Antietam.ĭirected by Peter Jean and narrated by Kevin Spacey - who does the greatest Carson impersonation I’ve ever seen, though not here, alas - King of Late Night scrutinizes the man’s giant cultural footprints and takes a crack at explaining his influence but it can only go so far because its subject is still inscrutable, and it can’t make Carson relevant again because the era he dominated has receded in our collective rearview. Although his work lives on through DVD boxed sets and YouTube clips, Carson now seems part of TV’s prehistoric, or pre- Sopranos, era, a name with no greater modern currency than Lucille Ball, Jackie Gleason, or Carson’s Tonight Show predecessors Steve Allen and Jack Paar. In the preceding thirteen years, he mostly avoided the spotlight following his retirement, it was as if he’d been sealed up in a pyramid. Carson died in 2005, a casualty of emphysema and heart problems brought on by smoking and drinking. None of that matters in a present-tense society, though. He was America’s tastemaker and mood ring, and one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. He could turn the tide against presidents with a cutting monologue joke and turn unknown comics into headliners with a delighted thumbs-up. On weeknights following the local news, most people watched Carson. Everybody watched the same shows at the same time. His departure left a vacuum that Jay Leno, David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, Ellen DeGeneres, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Kimmel, and umpteen other gabbers could never fill, partly because Carson was a uniquely gifted man, and partly because he rose to fame at a time when there were just three broadcast networks and no cable. He bid farewell as host of The Tonight Show twenty years ago next week, a date that serves as a hook for an American Masters special titled Johnny Carson: King of Late Night (PBS, May 14, 9 p.m.
It’s hard to describe to anyone under 30 how significant he was.
The older I get, the stranger it feels to say that. Photo: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
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