Remember
when people on television were expected to have a little class? It’s been a while, since about May 21st,
1992. On that night, Johnny Carson
retired as the host of The Tonight Show, after
4,531 episodes and 23,000 guests. Granted
access to the Carson archives, Peter Jones profiles the definitive American
talk show host in Johnny Carson: King of
Late Night (promo
here), which
airs on PBS’s American Masters this
Monday.
A
product of the Midwest, Carson never talked down to his audience or forgot
where he came from. Taking more than a
bit of a pop-psychology approach, Jones attributes great significance to Carson’s
need to impress his aloof mother and the attention he received as a teen-aged
magician. Carson got into television
more or less on spec, making little money in what was then a new and relatively
unseen medium. Needless to say,
television caught on and eventually so did Carson, though his early career
trajectory was decidedly erratic. In
fact, when Carson was offered The Tonight
Show after Jack Paar’s departure, many industry analysts were incredulous.
For
children of the 1980’s, King of Late
Night is a dramatic reminder how much media has changed in our
lifetimes. There was a time we vaguely
remember when Carson’s show was invariably the number one topic of conversation
the next day. His monologue was
considered a bellwether gauge of the national mood on current controversies in
a way that has no analog today. Unlike
his successors, Carson maintained a scrupulous political balance on his show,
gaining a reputation for tweaking both sides with equal playfulness. He also regularly booked classical and jazz
artists programming his show for the widest possible spectrum of the
country. Nobody does that anymore.
Jones
addresses Carson’s wider cultural significance, but also opens a window into
the very private public figure’s personal life.
At times, King feels slightly
more tabloidy than was probably intended, but given his three famous divorces
and a documented weakness for drink, it is impossible to ignore the dark side behind
his carefully crafted persona. Still,
Carson employed some rather deft jujitsu with the frequent divorce jokes that
shrewdly cast him as the beleaguered victim.
Indeed, Carson was a master of rhetoric, capable of milking masochistic
humor from jokes that ignobly died.
Perhaps
King is strongest documenting Carson’s
role as a comedy king-maker, featuring extensive recollections from comedians
and eventual Tonight Show guest hosts,
such as David Letterman, Jay Leno, Joan Rivers, Gary Shandling, Dick Cavett,
and Bob Newhart. Wife number two also
speaks quite affectionately about the man she claims to have pushed into
accepting the Tonight Show gig. Jones also well illustrates Carson’s career
with rare archival footage. However, the
one scene everyone wants to see—the supposedly apocryphal night he asked Zsa
Zsa Gabor to lift her cat—is never mentioned, not even to debunk it.
Many
viewers will be surprised how good it is to see Carson on television
again. Brisk but authoritative, King of Carson is an entertaining
television biography. Fulfilling your
recommended weekly nostalgia fix, it airs this Monday (5/14) on most PBS
outlets as part of the current season of American
Masters.
