A Brief History of 'The Tonight Show'
A Look Back at a Legendary Late Night TV Institution
In 1991, Johnny Carson, who had been the king of late-night television for decades, having hosted NBC's The Tonight Show since 1962, announced his retirement. (Jack Paar and Steve Allen were previous hosts.)
At the time, David Letterman hosted an NBC late-night talk show that aired right after Carson's show, The David Letterman Show.
Letterman assumed for years that when Carson retired, he'd get the prime 11:30 p.m. time slot and become the new host of The Tonight Show but that never transpired. Instead, following Carson's final Tonight Show appearance on May 22, 1992, Jay Leno took over the job as host, and a feud was born.
A New Level of the Fued Continued
On September 27, 2004, the 50th anniversary of The Tonight Show's debut, NBC announced that Conan O'Brien would take over the show from Jay Leno, who had inherited the position from Johnny Carson.
Leno's edition of the famed chat series was still doing well in the ratings, but O'Brien, who was enjoying late-night success with his own NBC show, was promised the Tonight Show hosting gig so that he would not exit the network.
However, NBC did not want to lose Leno either, so in 2009, The Jay Leno Show premiered as the first nightly network primetime talk show.
In 2010, due to poor ratings for both O'Brien and Leno's shows, NBC wanted to move Leno's show into O'Brien's timeslot, with O'Brien's version of The Tonight Show airing at 12:05 a.m.
O'Brien publicly announced that he would rather leave the show than allow that to transpire. NBC and O'Brien reached a settlement to allow him to leave the show seven months into his tenure. Leno then returned to The Tonight Show in March 2010.
Meanwhile, in the Past and the Future
The Tonight Show's previous host, Johnny Carson, never once appeared on successor Jay Leno's show.
Carson did, however, appear twice on rival late-night talk show Late Show with David Letterman (in a walk-on appearance soon after Letterman's show debuted, and later, in a filmed sketch).
In the years following Carson's Tonight Show retirement, he reportedly contributed jokes to Letterman's monologues from time to time.
In April of 2024, Conan O'Brien returned to The Tonight Show, this time as a guest to now-host Jimmy Fallon.
Herbie J Pilato is an actor, writer, producer, TV personality, talk show host, and the author of several pop-culture/media tie-in books including NBC & ME: MY LIFE AS A PAGE IN A BOOK, and his latest, ONE TOUGH DAME: THE LIFE AND CAREER OF DIANA RIGG, and CHRISTMAS TV MEMORIES: NOSTALGIC HOLIDAY FAVORITES OF THE SMALL SCREEN. For more information, or to order personally-signed copies of any of Herbie J’s books, visit HerbieJPilato.com, or email HerbieJPilato@outlook.com.
