21 Late Night Talk Shows Lost to Time
Photos courtesy of Getty Images
Watching The Larry Sanders Show for the first time years after it aired was revelatory for a couple of reasons. That show is so goddamn good that it would resonate with a teenage comedy nerd just for holding up so well, but it’s also a bizarre little time capsule of what ‘90s show business was like in a way that’s hard to ignore. You could watch Larry Sanders from space in 2099 and still recognize ego as ego, but when Tom Snyder or Joan Rivers swing by to plug their new talk show to Larry’s audience, even the most pop culture savvy TV fan would be forgiven for thinking “I have no idea what this is referencing.” So, by way of memorializing the fallen heroes of the Late Night Wars, here are some late night talk shows we have completely forgotten about, sorry.
1. Brand X with Russell Brand
There was a small boom in the early 2010s of talk shows being given to interesting people that were cancelled before their time. The Pete Holmes Show certainly qualifies, as does Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. But neither of those shows is the kind of perfect example of talk show hubris that Brand X was. Known primarily by Archer fans fast-forwarding through commercials, Brand X was initially just twenty-two minutes of Russell Brand slinking his way through riffs on the news in a kind of open ended monologue. Though eventually Brand integrated other segments, found a more appropriate sidekick in the form of former Sex Pistol Steve Jones and somehow got the show expanded to an hour, it was not enough for FX, who canned it almost immediately after its final episode.
2. Vibe
A lot of shows tried to capitalize on the sudden popularity and even more sudden cancellation of The Arsenio Hall Show, but none more transparently than Vibe. Created by Quincy Jones as a spin-off of his magazine of the same name, Vibe tried to re-capture Arsenio’s most iconic episode by having Bill Clinton as the guest for the pilot. Facing immediate competition from the similarly short-lived Keenan Ivory Wayans Show while dealing with the media’s insistence on comparing any two shows with black hosts, Vibe upped its game by replacing host Chris Spencer with the more charismatic Sinbad, but only managed to air twenty-eight episodes before being cancelled with little fanfare in 1998.
3. Tonight! America After Dark
The pre-Carson years of The Tonight Show are often unfairly lumped together, despite Steve Allen and Jack Paar’s individual and respected tenures as hosts, each giving birth to elements of the late night show that define the form even today. What we don’t remember at all is the brief, brief, briefest of moments in 1957 when, after Allen and Ernie Kovacs left The Tonight Show, NBC tried to reboot the whole thing as a late night spin on Today with an infinitely clumsier title, which managed to burn through three bands and two hosts in less than a year (one of them with the nickname “Jazzbo”). Obviously, everyone hated it, and with enough affiliates dropping the show altogether, NBC brought on Jack Paar to bring back the old format and save the day, which he did.
4. The Jay Leno Show
We certainly haven’t forgotten the kerfuffle this show caused, but we do forget how pointless and dumb this whole thing was in the first place. For any avid Paste readers ages six and under, Jay Leno retired from his terrible incarnation of The Tonight Show, passed it on to Conan O’Brien, and then basically started up his old show again as an hour-long product placement parade at 10 PM so NBC could save money on expensive scripted dramas. The fallout from the decision to move Leno back to 11:35 and bump The Tonight Show to 12:05 after NBC’s money-saving tactic backfired was wide-spread and well documented, and completely overshadowed the qualities of the new Leno show itself, which were few and far between.
5. The Daily Show (Craig Kilborn)
Whether you prefer Jon Stewart’s Daily Show or Trevor Noah’s Daily Show, I promise that you aren’t even thinking to consider Craig Kilborn’s Daily Show. Lasting less than two years before Stewart took over and guided the project in a more politically-minded direction, Kilborn’s tenure at The Daily Show was an ill-conceived attempt to ape Politically Incorrect’s shitty attitude. The whole thing was so mean-spirited, marred specifically by Kilborn’s sexist treatment of the female staff and co-creator Lizz Winstead, that Stephen Colbert later said the experience made you want to “take your soul off, put it on a wire hanger, and leave it in a closet” before going and doing a piece for Kilborn. Well, the lionized Stewart years have effectively wiped Kilborn’s show from our collective cultural memory. Kilborn would go on to play a similar role on The Late Late Show, greasing the wheels for someone else to come in and make something more memorable.
6. The Late Show
No, not that one. I’m talking about Fox’s various attempts in its early years to get in on the late night market with immediate diminishing returns. The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers was actually the first show to air on Fox, a move that made sense, considering Rivers’s success as the permanent guest host of Carson’s Tonight Show and NBC’s snub of Rivers as a possible replacement. Carson’s perceived betrayal by Rivers when he heard she was going to Fox was so intense that he never spoke to her again—it was some real King Lear shit. Rivers was replaced by Buck Henry in 1987 (her husband and co-producer Edgar Rosenberg tragically committed suicide a few months later), who was replaced by Arsenio (his first time hosting), who was replaced by Ross Shafer before Fox gave up. The whole thing was a disaster, but Rivers at least made the comeback she deserved in daytime.
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