‘Tonight’…The Jack Paar Era

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. In the photo below (and at the link above) we see Jack’s famous June 16, 1960 interview with JFK done with RCA TK11/31 black and white cameras in 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 of ‘Tonight’ 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.
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.

When network censors cut a joke about a “water closet” (the British term for a toilet), on February 11, 1960, he received national attention by leaving the show and did not return until three weeks later after the network apologized and he was allowed to tell the joke. 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, it 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.

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