July 29, 1957…The Jack Paar Era Of “Tonight” Begins
July 29, 1957…The Jack Paar Era Of “Tonight” Begins
Location wise, the “Tonight” show with Jack Paar started where Steve Allen left off…in the Hudson Theater, but the final show from there came the week the 1950s ended.
The first week of January 1960, the show’s new home would be NBC’s Studio 6B. The show went color September 19, 1960, but on January 12, 1959, while still at The Hudson, the show had begun being videotaped. For the first few months of taping, Paar did the Thursday night show live for some reason, but before long that ended and over the years, the taping time moved from 8 PM till 6:30 PM.
Steve Allen hosted his final episode of Tonight on January 25, 1957. The following Monday, NBC debuted a new multi-hosted, magazine show in the time slot…”Tonight: America After Dark”. It was an instant flop and they hurriedly began searching for someone who could do a new version, that was more like the old version.
The logical choice might have been Ernie Kovacs, who’d hosted two nights a week during the final months of Allen’s run, but Kovacs had moved west and was appearing in movies. Instead, they picked Jack Paar, who had hosted an array of short-lived programs for all the networks in the preceding years.
Paar got his first tastes of television in the early 1950s, appearing as a comic on “The Ed Sullivan Show” and hosting two game shows, “Up To Paar” (NBC) in 1952, and “Bank on the Stars” (CBS) in 1953, before hosting “The Morning Show” in 1954 on CBS.
Paar took over NBC’s late night time slot on July 29, 1957, and the early Paar “Tonight” program was a mess. At one point before its debut, someone at NBC got the brilliant idea that it should consist of three separate game shows. Each night, the contestant who won the first would move on to appear on the second…and so forth. This notion was discarded, in part because “America After Dark” was sinking fast, and there wasn’t the time to develop three new game shows.
So, they went with the idea of conversation/chat show but even then, NBC wanted to save a tiny amount of money by booking guests a week at a time — the same people for five nights in a row. This too was discarded but for the initial weeks, Paar struggled to make conversation with eccentric guests in whom he had no interest. Further souring the proceedings was the man selected as Paar’s sidekick, veteran comic actor Franklin Pangborn. Pangborn had been funny in scripted film parts but on a live, ad-lib show he was a disaster.
For several months, Paar teetered on the brink of cancellation but then everything miraculously came together. Pangborn was eliminated and eventually, the show’s announcer, Hugh Downs, expanded his role to full sidekick status, and Paar found his style and the right kind of guest to have on. He soon had a whole stock company of recurring visitors that included Alexander King, Oscar Levant, Dody Goodman, Jonathan Winters, Peter Ustinov, Hans Conried, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Elsa Maxwell, Cliff “Charlie Weaver” Arquette and Peggy Cass, and others.
When network censors cut a joke about a “water closet” (the British term for a toilet), on February 11, 1960, he made history by walking off the show. Between a conversation with Jonathan Winters, urging him to come back, and a network apology, he returned on March 7 to thunderous applause. Here is the departure, and return. https://youtu.be/LGU0QAG_9VI?t=55s
Paar’s emotional nature made the everyday routine of putting together a 105-minute program difficult to continue for more than five years. As a TV Guide item put it, he was “bone tired” of the grind. He signed off the show for the last time on Friday, March 30, 1962. The following six months were filled by numerous guest hosts as NBC awaited the expiration of the “no compete” part of Johnny Carson’s ABC contract.
Because NBC did not want to lose Paar to another network, they offered him a Friday prime-time hour, giving him carte blanche on content and format. Paar agreed, deciding on a variation of his late-night format and titling his show, which first aired in the fall of 1962, “The Jack Paar Program”…that ran until 1965.
At the link, Paar’s one of a kind intellect and curiosity on display as he interview’s Presidential Candidate John Kennedy, in June of 1960. Enjoy! -Bobby Ellerbee
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIkZK-Z21Pw
Here is Franklin Pangborn introducing Paar on that first show. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BW4wBKonjWs
The Paar show was a great show; but America After Dark was also a great show. That’s what brought me into the time slot as a viewer. I forget the name of the host of Dark; but he was famous to anybody who was into jazz. (Sorry…Al “Jazzbo” Collins.) And the theme song was “Jim and Andy’s.” America After Dark was a great transitional show for a seventeen-year-old transitioning from high school into college. When I was 23 years old, and standing in the mess line at Fort Knox, I received the letter from my mom, that Johnny Carson (my favorite comedian) had been selected to do the Tonight Show.
I didn’t know about the Franklin Pangborn part. I suppose nothing from that survives?
The very few clips I’ve found of the Paar Tonight Show are an amazing resemblance in visual style and modernity to what followed with Carson, including interesting visuals on the cutaways to commercials.