Welcome to Don’t Touch That Dial, a classic TV podcast. Did you grow up in the 70s and 80s? Did you rush home from school to watch reruns of the Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family? On each episode of Don't Touch That Dial, three guys who love TV will look back on those days and talk about the shows and stars that made watching television before streaming, DVRs, and even VCRs so special.
ANTHONY: From Hollywood, it’s Don’t Touch that Dial, a classic TV podcast and we’re talking about late-night talk shows. And unfortunately, the Don’t Touch that Dial orchestra is on strike, but we have plenty of stupid human tricks for you. I'm Anthony Stoeckert.
JODY: And I'm Jody Schwartz, up late.
KEITH: And I'm Keith Loria
ANTHONY: Before we start talking about Johnny, Dave Jay and Chevy, there is a new commercial that we have to talk about. It's a commercial starring John Travolta and, Jody, why don't you – is it for Capital One? Is that the bank?
KEITH: Yes, yeah. One of our sponsors, by the way.
JODY: I have their card.
ANTHONY: So Jody, why don't you tell us about this and we'll all share some thoughts.
JODY: All right. Well, so much to unpack here. It's Travolta. It's walking down the street right out of the beginning of Saturday Night Fever. So the way Saturday Night Fever opens when Travolta’s walking down the street, you know, on his way to work. This is Travolta dressed up as Santa walking down the street doing the exact same things. He stops in a pizza place. Oh, that's sorry. It's not a pizza place. It's actually cookies. Yes, Christmas cookies. He stops in there, gets the cookies. He stops by a shoe store and puts his own shoe up next to it like he does in the movie. And then he goes to buy something and the person behind the counter is Donna Pescow, who, of course, was his co-star on Saturday Night Fever and of course was Angie on television. And she actually says to him, “Where have you been?” which is extremely funny and then he's walking and it ends with him in the disco dancing like, you know Tony Manero. It's phenomenal.
ANTHONY: Keith, go ahead.
KEITH: No, I'm just gonna say I saw it yesterday for the first time and I was mesmerized. Seeing Travolta in anything is always great. But yes, I was shocked to see what it was. Beautiful.
JODY: I saw it for the first time about a week ago. My son and I were watching a game and it came on and I was sort of like doing something and I looked at like, “Oh my God,” and I rewound it and my son gives me this look like, oh god another commercial he's into.
ANTHONY: I watched it after you guys told me about it. I'm gonna have to confess I don't think I would have known that was Donna Pescow. I just might not have been paying close enough attention, like I knew it was her because you guys said it. And I will also point out, yes, he goes to a cookie shop and I believe he's eating two cookies at the same time.
JODY: Yes, he is. My apologies for not saying that before.
ANTHONY: The way Tony ate two slices of pizza at the same time on top of each other.
JODY: “Two’s good. Two’s good.”
ANTHONY: That's a really, really good touch. He's in the zone where he's doing this really fun stuff where he can look back and kind of have fun with his career
JODY: Like that commercial with the two guys from Scrubs, which is like from Grease.
ANTHONY: Yeah, he's doing a lot of that. Pretty soon, there'll be a Moment By Moment-themed commercial.
JODY: Urban Cowboy.
ANTHONY: Right. Well, let's get on to the topic of this week's show. And that is late night television, which is mostly talk shows. This is a big topic. I'll make this as quick as I can. Basically it starts with The Tonight Show. That's the anchor of this whole thing.
KEITH: Yes!
ANTHONY: Before we were born…
JODY: You are correct sir!
ANTHONY: … it debuted in 1954, created by Sylvester Pat Weaver who was Sigourney Weaver's father, and the original host was Steve Allen and my memories of Steve Allen were him being old and just complaining about everything. That's my memories of Steve Allen, but he was a big influence on Letterman. Then it was hosted by Jack Paar for a while, famously, and then Johnny Carson began his legendary reign in 1962. He would have been the first host that any of us remember and I'll start by saying this, I give Carson all due credit, he was a legend, but I think the show was just kind of nice and pleasant. And the reason it was successful was that there were only like four or five channels at the time. And give him credit, anytime anybody tried to challenge and he won, again, I have all due respect for that. I don't exactly sit back and watch The Tonight Show. It's fun, it's entertaining. It's old showbiz. I don't see where you had to watch this every night.
JODY: The funny thing I'll say about that is, you know, again, I don't remember the first time I saw The Tonight Show, you know, it's one of those things it's, it was always there.
ANTHONY: Part of the fabric. Yeah, absolutely.
JODY: Who remembers the first time they actually saw it, but I remember as a kid that show with Johnny, it always felt dated to me, maybe because I was so young maybe, but it always felt like I was watching something like, you know, a tape from like something from the 50s like throughout the whole it was you know, again, give him all the credit the world and he was an influence on a lot of people. The show always felt like there was something dated about the show. Always.
ANTHONY: Keith.
KEITH: Yeah, I have to ask you, how old are you? You have memories of Steve Allen?
ANTHONY: I don't have memories of Steve Allen on The Tonight Show. Okay, I have memories of him being interviewed in the 80s where he would be …
JODY: The 90s too.
ANTHONY:.Yeah, he lived for a while and he would complain… Who was he married to?
KEITH: Mrs. Allen.
JODY: One of the …not Audrey Meadows, her sister.
ANTHONY: Audrey Meadows’ sister, right?
KEITH: Judy Meadows? Jane, Jane Meadows.
ANTHONY: Yeah, yeah. I just remember him being interviewed and he was, he was just one of these guys who talked about how things were dirty now and he claimed to have written like 10,000 songs or something like that. And you know, he had an obvious toupee on his head.
JODY: And a real bug in his ear about Stern. That's what got a lot of these conversations started.
ANTHONY: Really? I don’t remember that. Back then? Because back then Stern was mainly in New York.
JODY: But in the 90s he was still talking about it. I think that got him going on. I think that got him going on it. That came up a couple of times when Howard started to get bigger.
ANTHONY: Yeah. And I think he might have been bitter because he did kind of create The Tonight Show and the basics of that format, but everybody thought everybody went to Carson; Carson was the legend.
JODY: And he actually ... there were several interviews where he said not-great things about Carson as a person, you know, and but, you know, he tried to be as diplomatic as he could, but I remember watching him and going he just took a shot at Johnny.
ANTHONY: Yeah. And there's big joke when he was interviewed, he would always go “In all seriousness aside.” I saw him make that joke like a thousand times.
JODY: You know what's funny, he always talked about, he did that thing where he had the tea bags on the suit, he went in for the water. That was a famous bit, he did. And then Letterman did a bit where he's wearing a Velcro suit and he gets stuck on a wall. And I mean, Letterman always gave Steve Allen credit for that idea. Like, when Steve Allen would talk about it, he would talk about it as if it was stolen from him. Dave always said, “This is a Steve Allen.”
ANTHONY: Letterman also did one where he was covered in potato chips. He was dumped into a dip. So speaking of Letterman, there were several people in the 70s, who – I guess in the 60s also – who tried to challenge Johnny Carson. Famously Joey Bishop, right?
JODY: Joey Bishop, The Joey Bishop Show.
ANTHONY: And Regis was his sidekick.
Jody: Regis was his sidekick.
KEITH: Oh, I didn't know that.
ANTHONY: Yeah. And then Dick Cavett carved out a little space. He managed to, you know, have a somewhat successful show doing something different from Carson. Basically it was Carson and then, what, in 1982 I think…
Jody: ‘82 is when Dave premiered on 12:30, but before that they had Tom Snyder at 12:30.
ANTHONY: Yes, which definitely was a success. You know, for me, Letterman was…
JODY: Some background: essentially The Tonight Show was 90 minutes. And then, Johnny wanted to only do an hour because it was getting exhausting for him to do 90 minutes. I don't blame him for that. And really the last half hour of The Tonight Show when it was 90 minutes was like authors or like you know, obscure people. It would be an hour of wackiness and then like a half hour of you know, let's talk to the nuclear physicist, you know, that kind of deal.
KEITH : That’s when they would have us on, the podcast.
JODY: Exactly. “Here we are with Keith Loria.” Then when they cut it back to an hour, they gave a show to Tom Snyder.
ANTHONY: Yeah, one thing I'll say also about The Tonight Show that I liked that I wish other people had done was I really liked the guest hosts idea.
JODY: Yes.
ANTHONY: So Johnny would go on vacation and it would be, Letterman might fill in. David Brenner, famously; Joan Rivers, Burt Reynolds would do it.
JODY: Leno. Leno did it for… Leno was a permanent…
ANTHONY: Leno became a permanent and Garry Shandling permanent also.
KEITH: Wasn't Joan kind of a permanent one for a while, too?
JODY: Jay was the only one they ever said was the permanent one. You know what I mean? Jay was the only one that ever made an announcement saying he's our permanent guest host. Everybody else for a while it was Joan and Joan was just a person who kept coming back. Same thing with Brenner and then Shandling. There was a point when they offered both Leno and Shandling to share the guest hosting duties. But Shandling didn't want to commit to that.
ANTHONY: I thought… they didn't declare Joan the permanent replacement before Leno?
JODY: They never declared her that. It was just kind of understood. And then at one point they told her straight out that she wasn't going to get the show which is why she went and got our own show. You know Johnny had issues with women comedians. That should be kept in mind.
ANTHONY: He had a lot of issues.
JODY: A lot of the women comedians who are on The Tonight … you know, The Tonight Show used to be the place where comics got launched. That used to be where you would go. If you got on The Tonight Show as a comic and Johnny asked you to come sit on the couch because you did well, that would make a comedian’s career skyrocket. And when The Tonight Show moved out – The Tonight Show started out in New York – when it moved to L.A. in the early 70s, that's when a lot of comics began to go out to New York and that's where the rise of the Comedy Store and other things happened in L.A., with the L.A. comedy scene. The only time you ever saw female comics on The Tonight Show was when there was a female guest host.
ANTHONY: Really?
JODY: I'm sure there's probably some examples of a female comic on with Johnny.
ANTHONY: I was gonna say Elayne Boosler was never on with Johnny?
JODY: Funny you should say that. Elayne Boosler, I believe, her debut on The Tonight Show was when Helen Reddy was guest hosting.
ANTHONY: Really?
JODY: Yeah, I think I had read that somewhere, that Elayne Boosler was somebody and Elayne Boosler came up with Leno and Letterman and Robin Williams. She was in that group from the Comedy Store in the 70s. And she had a hard time getting on The Tonight Show, because Johnny had an issue with that.
KEITH: And Roseanne Barr, you would think, probably in the early 80s?
JODY: I mean, Barr definitely was on with Carson. I like that point. It had changed a bit; by the time, Roseanne came up. There's no doubt Roseanne was on. There's probably others. I don't want to say it never happen. I’m just saying…
ANTHONY: Obviously, Joan Rivers was.
JODY: Joan Rivers for sure; Phyllis Diller, for sure. (She keeps coming up today.) The disparity between male comics and female comics is great.
ANTHONY: So anyhow, in 1982, Letterman started and I know for me and Jody – I’m not sure, Keith, how much of a Letterman fan you are – but for me, this was the talk show, his NBC show. I taped every episode. Not only do I tape it, I watched every minute of it. It didn't matter who the guest was. It didn't matter who the music person was. I wanted to see every single minute of every single episode because it had this edge and you just didn't know what was gonna happen.
JODY: That was the first show that I ever said I don't even care who the guest is. I'm just watching it for this. And it was the first talk show that I felt like all right, this is my kind of humor, because it was very small when it started, the late night show – it was actually called Late Night. I swear, like there was a couple of months where I'm like, I may be the only one watching this. I didn't realize it would be…
ANTHONY: Yes!
JODY: … Because it wasn't like, it wasn't you know, it was on 12:30. There was no internet then so didn’t get any buzz from anything like that. And, I would say I was watching the show for a year, thinking, it's just me and my friend, Brian, who we watched it together. Yeah, we tape it, like we're the only people watching the show. I was expecting him to say, “Hey Jody and Brian.”
ANTHONY: Letterman used to say, it wasn't me prisoners watching the show. And my earliest memory of the show was Larry Bud Melman meeting people at a bus station, I think, and he offered them a hot towel. He always had the microphone in the wrong place. Like when he spoke, the microphone was in front of the person's mouth and then when the person answered, he would put the microphone in his face, and I don't think that was like planned, I just think that was – his real name was Calvert…?
JODY: Calvert DeForest.
ANTHONY: Yeah, I just think that guy was not exactly a broadcasting pro. That's my earliest memory of Letterman.
JODY: I remember things like, you know, “can a guy dressed in a bear suit hail a cab?” and it would be a guy in a bear suit trying to hail a cab
KEITH: I wasn't as big into talk shows back in the 80s. I did know about the top 10 list, and maybe I would watch that and then stop watching. But the late night talk shows were on opposite, like episodes of The Honeymooners or The Odd Couple, so I would rather watch those back then, though in the early 90s when Letterman got his own show, you know, opposite Johnny, that's when I started to watch…
JODY: It was never on opposite Johnny. It was on opposite Leno.
KEITH: But… Okay, right. Yeah. Yeah.
JODY: By the time Dave got on 11:30, Johnny was gone and Leno was hosting The Tonight Show
ANTHONY: And of course, famously, Carson retires and there's this whole behind-the-scenes war, written about brilliantly in a book by Bill Carter called The Late Shift?
JODY: Two books.
ANTHONY: Well, the first one…
JODY: The first one was groundbreaking, yeah
ANTHONY: The first one is Letterman-Leno, the second one was Leno-Conan.
JODY: And everybody else.
ANTHONY: There was all this behind-the-scenes craziness: Who was going to take over The Tonight Show? Letterman gets the CBS show. Leno will eventually win in the ratings. But Letterman had tremendous success on CBS and a decade at least it haunted him that he didn't get The Tonight Show. He had his own show. And to me, Letterman was more groundbreaking than anyone because he made 12:30 a viable spot and then he laid the groundwork for every network having a show at 11:30. Without him that might not happen. And I always said it was like – I pictured like Ray Romano wishing he could be on The Cosby Show and everybody telling him “Oh, no, you can't have The Cosby Show.” And then Ray Romano gets Everybody Loves Raymond and after it's over going, “Yeah, you know, I really just wanted to start with The Cosby Show.” Like I never understood this obsession with The Tonight Show. It was really just a time slot, not a show.
JODY: And really what it is, was he wanted to succeed Johnny Carson, he was Johnny Carson. He was a fan of Johnny Carson.
ANTHONY: They all did.
JODY: They all did but it really meant a lot to him
ANTHONY: I think with Letterman it was genuine.
JODY: Yeah, it was very genuine. We always talk about this, in the sense that you know, Jay Leno would later talk about wanting to succeed Johnny, but Jay wanted to be a great comedian. Jay wanted to be a great stand up. Someone put it in his head he has to be a talk show host and that's what he did. You know he went for the best deal he can get which was hosting The Tonight Show at that time. But it wasn't … with Jay it was all about other things. It wasn't, you know, succeeding Johnny. Letterman, it was all about being the guy after Carson.
ANTHONY: Yeah, it still just doesn't make sense to me because again, it was really just a time slot.
JODY: Always a time.
ANTHONY: … Not the show, yeah. Keith, do you have anything to say about this?
KEITH: I do remember the whole Letterman thing the first night It premiered, how big a deal it was.
JODY: Yeah.
ANTHONY: Yes. Good point .
KEITH: I was in college at the time, '93, and they were having like big screenings at my school …
ANTHONY: Really?
KEITH: My friends took a date to it. Like that's how big of a deal it was. And it was one of their first dates ever and they were going to see the Letterman on the screen with, you know, all these people on campus and…
JODY: Tell me they're married now and this is a great story!?
KEITH: They are married now. Yeah!
ANTHONY: That's awesome!
KEITH: They’re really are. Shout out to Dave and Mindy. They're listening hopefully. Yeah, no. It was amazing.
ANTHONY: You guys remember…?
JODY: That story just got elevated.
ANTHONY: Do you guys remember who the musical guest was on the first episode?
JODY: Billy Joel.
ANTHONY: Yeah, so promoting his last rock pop album.
JODY: River of Dreams.
ANTHONY: Last studio album. Bill Murray was the guest. He was the first guest of the 12:30 show in ‘82.
ANTHONY: Yes.
JODY: And he was the first guest in the 11:30 show in ‘93. And very famously, he came in like he was out of breath, and then he said, “I went to the other place.”
ANTHONY: Yeah. He goes, “I was at the other place. There's nobody there, man.”
JODY: “There’s nobody there.”
KEITH: So when Letterman did…
JODY: Of course, a cameo by Paul Newman.
ANTHONY: Famously.
JODY: Famously, and because the show was at the Ed Sullivan Theater in the middle of Broadway, he looked up and said, “Where the hell are singing cats?” He looks at his ticket like he's in the wrong place.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
KEITH: I was gonna ask when Letterman did his – was it Netflix where he did the one-hour talk show or…?
ANTHONY: Yeah.
KEITH: Did Bill Murray ever do that as well?
ANTHONY: I don't think so.
JODY: I don't think he did. No.
ANTHONY: That's a good question.
JODY: Very good question, but I don't think he did.
ANTHONY: You mentioned, Jody, the Ed Sullivan Theater. That's like what I'm talking about, like the Ed Sullivan Theater was abandoned and they rebuilt it for him and they made it beautiful and it's still being used to this day. Like that's where Elvis was and where the Beatles were. And yet he apparently for like 10 years. He was bitter over The Tonight Show.
JODY: I think he still is but when it comes up in interviews, he's still…
ANTHONY: He's come to peace with it now.
JODY: He may be at peace with it, but when he talks about it, when somebody asks him about it on an interview, you could still see the hurt on his face.
ANTHONY: Yeah.
JODY: It's really, it's quite remarkable.
KEITH: I want to talk about bitter. I only got to see Letterman once in person, and he did not do a top-10 list when I was there. I was so mad. But Don Rickles was one of the guests and it was great seeing Don.
ANTHONY: That’s cool.
JODY: That is very cool. A little word on ….
ANTHONY: This is the CBS show?
KEITH: Yeah, it was Rickles, Mary Tyler Moore, and then...
ANTHONY: Oh, wow!
KEITH: I don't remember, it’s gonna come to me, but it was, like the, it is a family and they have a couple of sons that really aren't talented at all. But do you know who I'm talking about?
ANTHONY: No, the Hanson brothers?
KEITH: No. We’ll get to it. They all have weird names like Dweezil – Zappa! It was Zappa’s kids.
ANTHONY: Oh, oh.
JODY: Zappa!
KEITH: Dweezil and one other. They all had a band, I guess.
ANTHONY: Moon? Was there a daughter named Moon Unit?
JODY: There was a daughter named Moon Unit.
KEITH: But this was just the two brothers. So.
ANTHONY: Okay, gotcha. Was the theater cold? Supposedly he liked it..
KEITH: Oh it was freezing.
JODY: I saw him live there too. And it's freezing.
ANTHONY: Yeah, I never made it. I saw him tape two anniversary specials at Radio City Music Hall when he was on NBC, but I never went to like a regular taping.
JODY: A little word on the top-10 lists. Anthony and I, when we were in college,used to sit and write up top-10 lists.
KEITH: Oh, I did that as well.
JODY: … in the school newspaper office, which is why we're doing this and we're not doctors.
ANTHONY: Oh, how life could have been different if we hadn’t wasted our time because…
JODY: Instead of studying, we sat there and did top 10, and some people we went to school with still have those.
ANTHONY: Yeah, I kind’ve wished they didn't. Every once in a while somebody from our school will go, “Look what I found” on Facebook or something and I’m like, “Oh for crying out loud!”
JODY: It was about stuff that was relevant for then, like an top-10 of stuff on campus.
ANTHONY: Yeah, stuff that was relevant to CW Post in 1990. It just doesn't make any sense now
JODY: Doesn't make any sense now but they keep popping up.
ANTHONY: Yeah, so Carson retires; Leno took over for Carson famously and Leno and Letterman were on together less than a year, I want to guess.
JODY: Leno took over The Tonight Show in May of 92. And Dave left in the middle of 93.
ANTHONY: Yeah, he still had the ride out of contract.
JODY: Oh, about a year. Yeah, he's still riding a contract. They also made a deal with him that they would that he would give them a couple more months on the air because they already sold the advertising. And the thing he got in return was that he could start shopping himself around to get another gig.
ANTHONY: Gotcha. And then Conan O'Brien took over for David Letterman.
JODY: A word on that. At the time, this was a weird announcement. Conan had no on-air experience. He was a writer, he’d been a writer on SNL. He had been a writer on The Simpsons, and he had very little on-air experience.
ANTHONY: Basically just being in the background.
JODY: … in the background and …
ANTHONY: … of some SNL skits and that's it.
JODY: Yeah, he wrote some amazing Simpsons episodes and…
ANTHONY: He wrote the monorail episode.
KEITH: Monorail…
JODY: Yeah. Lorne Michaels was producing the 12:30 show and he hired Conan.
ANTHONY: They tried hard to get Dana Carvey, I think.
JODY: Well they tried both Dana Carvey and Garry Shandling. Yeah.
ANTHONY: Shandling never would have done it.
JODY: Shandling … funny thing about Gary Shandling was he could have had a late night show on so many occasions. He could have been in the running for The Tonight Show. He was offered a chance to share guest hosting duties with Leno. He turned that down, which would have put him in the running for The Tonight Show when Johnny retired. He turned that down. He turned down a syndicated offer which eventually became The Dennis Miller Show, which was gone quickly. He turned back down. He turned down a chance to be on the 12:30 show after Dave had left. He just didn't want to do it.
KEITH: I gotta be honest. He was actually offered Anthony’s slot on this podcast.
JODY: Yes he was.
ANTHONY: So I think he was a smart guy.
JODY: Completely smart guy.
ANTHONY: He didn't want to be involved.
JODY: It’s a horrible job.
ANTHONY: So instead of talking about Conan a lot – although there is something about his first episode I'd love to talk about we are…
KEITH: Was Vanessa Bayer on?
ANTHONY: No…Oh, yes! She was an intern! She actually was! She was an intern for Conan. There were some, shall we say, less than successful shows that tried to compete during this era. We should, we really should give a shout out to Arsenio Hall because he had a big success.
KEITH: Very.
ANTHONY: He managed to be successful against Carson.
JODY: Yes. And that was because he found his own niche. He didn't try to take on Carson head to head.
ANTHONY: Right. Right. And his show was a very fun, energetic. It was a talk show, but with a different vibe. And you have to give him a lot, a lot of credit for, you know, surviving. It's more fun to talk about the shows that didn’t succeed and one of the biggest one, Jody, and I know you want to talk about this, was the Thicke of the Night.
JODY: Thicke of the Night.
ANTHONY: Tell us what the hell this is.
JODY: All right. Thicke of the Night was a syndicated talk show which ran from September of 83 to June of 84 and it starred Alan Thicke, who at the time was a Canadian talk show host. He would eventually go on to star in Growing Pains and now his son is a big recording artist, Robin Thicke.
ANTHONY: Alan wrote songs too, right?
JODY: Alan wrote the theme to Different Strokes. He wrote the theme to The Facts of Life. Strangely enough, they didn't let him write the theme to Growing Pains.
KEITH: And he was married to soap star Gloria Loring.
JODY: Gloria Loring who actually sang the theme to Growing Pains. You know, he took the good, he took the band and he had this talk show called Thicke of the Night. First of all, Arsenio Hall was his announcer and his sidekick on the show. So Arsenio would do “Alaaan Thicke!” and then he would sit on the couch with him. There was no desk like most talk shows, it was just a bunch of people on a couch. He had Playboy centerfolds actually assisting him in bits. They were clothed but he would make a point of saying that they're a Playboy centerfolds. He did the newspaper headline bit that Leno would eventually make.
ANTHONY: Oh, really?
JODY: Yeah, he had a newspaper headline bit.
ANTHONY: Did he call it “headlines?”
JODY: He didn't call it “headlines.” Not like Jay, “Hey, headlines” (imitates Leno) No.
KEITH: That was good.
JODY: That was pretty good, right? I can do Jay. I’m not as good as Anthony with his expressions, but I can do Jay.
KEITH: Can you do Alan Thicke?
JODY: I'm trying.
ANTHONY: I can do Gilbert. I can kind of do Gilbert's impression of Alan Thicke.
JODY: Let’s hear it.
ANTHONY: Well, it's not gonna be good, but Gilbert would talk about Alan Thicke because Gilbert was on Thicke of the Night also. And Gilbert would go, “It’s Gilbert in the catwalk.”
JODY: Not bad.
ANTHONY: That's it. That's all Gilbert would do; that was Gilbert’s Alan Thicke impression.
JODY: He kind of had skits sprinkled throughout the show, so it wasn't like, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do this; out of nowhere, like a skit would pop up which was kind of funny. But here's an interesting thing. On April of 84, Martin Sheen was on the show, okay? And inexplicably, after he's done talking about, you know, his upcoming project, he starts talking about his biggest concern is nuclear arms. So he's talking, so he's now getting serious because it was 84 so a presidential election was coming up. He's talking about how worried he is about the whole nuclear arms thing. In the middle of this interview, it segues, out of nowhere, into a skit of Alan Thicke as an old man in the year 2034 talking about the world in 2034. So it's like, it's this weird moment. First, Martin Sheen’s getting serious about nuclear arms and Alan Thicke is sitting there trying to pretend to be interested in this. And then it segues into this weird skit and he's actually says in the skit the NBA is still around and Magic Johnson has found a way to like keep himself young and he's still playing.
ANTHONY: Oh, wow.
JODY: Well, that's that's also there. Just to add to this, Ray Parker Jr. was on that particular episode.
ANTHONY: Nice.
JODY: Fred Willard was a recurring guest. You mentioned Gilbert but also Richard Belzer was also a regular on it, he was regular and in March of 84, the Red Hot Chili Peppers had their first TV appearance on Thicke of the Night. So some interesting … somehow this didn't work. So somehow this thing went sideways and fell into the abyss, but some fun moments on Thicke of the Night.
ANTHONY: We're running low on time, but we also there's another notorious flop I think we have to talk about and that's Chevy Chase. They built a theater for him, and there was so much hype behind this and they didn't last – what like three months or something?
KEITH: Yeah. I don’t even think it lasted that long.
JODY: It wasn't even three months. It was like September of 93 to like October.
KEITH: And I think part of the problem was his audience. They allowed them to drink and people just, they were so rowdy and would speak over the guests and…
JODY: He also had a piano at the desk. The desk was a piano.
ANTHONY: And it had a fish tank behind him.
JODY: They had a fish tank behind him. Yeah. And he had Goldie Hawn singing to him on the first episode.
ANTHONY: Yeah, I've watched a few clips here and there. I think the big issue is he just clearly did not care about this from the beginning. It was, and that's like, his personality was always sort of be the indifferent cool guy but if you’re gonna talk to people every night, you gotta care.
JODY: I think they were relying on the fact that he did guest-host The Tonight Show, but that had been, that was a long time before that. He guest-hosted in the 70s a couple of times, you know, by the 90s, this was not something he was doing any more.
ANTHONY: Yeah. And I mean, he was so hot in the 70s, you know, he could have done anything he wanted in the 70s, but by the time that show came around, he wasn't quite as popular. We should also point out that somehow Pat Sajak tried to take on Carson, which, I don't think I watched a couple of episodes back in the day. Here's where I'll give Johnny his credit. Sajak was just like a bland Carson like he was basically doing what Carson did but there was no zip or cleverness to it.
JODY: Yeah, nothing. Nothing.
KEITH: Was the Wheel on?
ANTHONY: No. He really should’ve had the wheel.
JODY: No, that would have made it a success.
KEITH: But who was his assistant? Was Vanna on?
ANTHONY: Oh no no, no. He did like a standard talk show.
KEITH: Oh I remember it. I just don't remember who his co-host was.
ANTHONY: I don't know if he had one.
JODY: I don't think he had one.
ANTHONY: Sidekicks kind of went away and then Conan, like Conan had the novelty of bringing back a sidekick with Andy so that was like a different kind of thing.
JODY: One quick thing I want to talk about is Joan Rivers had her own show and actually called the Late Show, which would eventually be the name that Letterman would take .
ANTHONY: This was on Fox?
JODY: It was on Fox from 86 to 88. She came out, and mind you this caused a big problem between her and Carson.
ANTHONY: Huge.
JODY: It’s too much to get into on that. She had the show. It premiered in October of 86. She was fired by Fox in May of 87. And then her husband committed suicide. He was a producer on the show. And so they had rotating guests. They had rotating guests for a while and one of the rotating guests was Suzanne Somers – guest hosts, I should say rotating guest hosts – one was Suzanne Somers and then Arsenio took over for the last 13 weeks.
ANTHONY: That got him going. And I remembered Robert Townsend was hosting and he thought Eddie Murphy was going to be on and then Murphy called him up and said, “No, I'm gonna be on when Arsenio is hosting.”
JODY: Suzanne Somers, I remember had on Robin Givens and that's where she announced she was dating Mike Tyson.
ANTHONY: Wow. Little bit of history there. And these shows all still exist. Letterman Show still exists hosted by Colbert. The Tonight Show still exists, unfortunately, hosted by Jimmy Fallon.
JODY: Still going.
ANTHONY: Yeah, Late Night still exists with Seth Meyers, which I like that show a lot. So.
JODY: I like Jimmy Kimmel.
ANTHONY: Yeah, Kimmel. Kimmel’s good. Yes. You don't watch any of these, Keith?
KEITH: Yeah, I haven't watched a talk show in 20 years.
ANTHONY: Wow. There blows our chance to have on all of these guys. They were, you know, we'll never have Letterman on that because Keith didn’t watch.
KEITH: I will say that in sixth grade I did put down for “a career that you want,” I put down “host of the David Letterman show.”
ANTHONY: Perfect.
KEITH: Still hoping for that.
JODY: We're getting Dave, by hook or by crook.
ANTHONY: Thank you everyone. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed this. Bye everyone.
JODY: Bye everyone
KEITH: Take care.
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