Some Drivel On...Late-Night Television

“How long they been doing this?” Morty Seinfeld asks his son Jerry upon learning The Tonight Show is taped in the afternoon to be aired at night. “30 years,” Jerry sighs. You understand Morty’s confusion, though. I have never attended a taping of The Tonight Show, or The Late Show, or Late Night, but I imagine the whole thing feeling a little out of place, like watching football in June. (Jimmy Kimmel Live! on ABC has, contrary to its title, also been pre-recorded for years.) When I was a kid, I would sometimes tape Letterman or Conan to the VCR and watch it the next day after school, and while it remained enjoyable, the mood never felt quite right, what with the sun still in the sky and dinner still to be eaten. You wouldn’t tape Good Morning America and watch it at midnight, would you? 

My relationship to late night TV began with Johnny Carson. At first, I didn’t even really watch Johnny Carson, but my parents did, the small color television set in their bedroom flickering the walls with light, the faint sounds of Johnny and his guests and the Doc Severinson Orchestra wafting down the hallway, and I would listen and imagine Burbank, CA as a faraway enchanted kingdom. It was for grown-ups, in other words, not kids, a truth evoked in 8-year-old Kevin McCallister watching The Tonight Show in his parents’ bed in “Home Alone” (1990). But that’s also why paradoxically, and in opposition to modern late night-TV viewing demographics always cited in death of late-night TV pieces, like those in the wake of Stephen Colbert getting the (eventual) axe, I have always associated the genre more with being a kid than an adult.

I only started watching at the tail-end of Carson’s run as the king of late night, meaning the tail-end of the genre as true monoculture, when it was a collective experience essentially limited to one network. Carson’s subsequent retirement in 1992, however, and the ensuing so-called War for Late Night as Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show and David Letterman left for CBS epitomized late-night TV’s fracturing, one that has only grown more pronounced and dire over the years. The bizarre thing, though, is that even when these after-hours variety shows were culturally prevalent, airing in those hours of blackened stillness, when the rest of the house was asleep, it felt like the rest of my small town was asleep too. Unlike, say, the TGIF programming block on ABC, or NBC’s Must See TV, I never felt the whole world watching along with me.

I gradually stopped tuning in to late-night as I aged and learned I was more of a morning person. I still saw Letterman from time to time, or especially the Colbert of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, but that was in the form of clips and memes disseminated the morning after via the internet and social media. That’s how the world works, adapt or die, etc., but it also suggests that late-night TV isn’t about late at night anymore. The genre is fading away because stars don’t need it to promote their work, and because it costs too much money to produce, and all the other practical reasons that been cited a hundred times over. But when I think of late-night TV, I think of the time on Late Night when Letterman suddenly said apropos of nothing that it was cartwheel time with Regis Philbin and the hardest working man in show business ran in and cartwheeled through the aisles. I cannot, however, find online evidence of this skit. Did I conflate it with something else? Did I imagine it entirely? Either way, it’s a possibly faulty memory that feels apropos of what made it magical. What happened late at night always vanished by morning.