He was, indeed, the king. As a child of the ’70s and ’80s, I grew up watching Johnny Carson every night on NBC. To this day, it hosts some of my favorite memories of great television moments. Throughout its run, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson was an iconic shared entertainment experience among a huge percentage of us Americans. At his peak, Johnny enjoyed a nightly audience of 15 million viewers – double the current audience of Jay Leno and David Letterman combined. He captured the zeitgeist of American entertainment from the ’60s into the ’90s.
Last night, I finally caught up with the PBS American Masters documentary Johnny Carson: King of Late Night. The movie is ably directed by two-time Emmy®-winning filmmaker Peter Jones, who clearly acquired unprecedented access to Johnny’s personal records, memorabilia and show archives. Coming in at two hours in length, the film is cut with exhaustive and revelatory interviews with staff, colleagues, writers, family members, his former wife Joanne, and guests and comics whose careers were launched by successful appearances on The Tonight Show.
Jones starts at the very beginning with Johnny’s childhood, where we learn about his affinity for card and magic tricks and his complicated relationship with his mother – a relationship that might explain his notoriously complicated relationship with women. Carson’s success seemed to be propelled by that commonly held theory about many successful performers: he sought attention and approval from others because he never got it at home. Carson’s mother Ruth never really gave him that approval, even at the height of his power.
According to legend and to the testimony of many in this film, the fun and personable Johnny we loved on television was very different from the man he was off-camera. It’s not to say he was an outright jerk, but he did seem to prefer privacy and distance when he wasn’t working, especially as years went on. He was a loner and an enigma to many people, a Citizen Kane whose Rosebud remains a mystery – perhaps the love of a mother or the book of magic tricks he had as a child. No one is absolutely certain.
But at 11:30 every night, he made us laugh and tucked us all in. As “Johnny,” he was indeed the king. He ruled late night television for the last third of the twentieth century. Ever cool, ever accessible, ever funny and ever the master, Johnny Carson is arguably the biggest star in television history.
The documentary is narrated by Kevin Spacey and features insightful interviews with beloved A-list entertainers like David Letterman, Jay Leno, Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano, Drew Carey, Garry Shandling, Steve Martin, Angie Dickinson, Ellen DeGeneres, Carl Reiner, Don Rickles, Bob Newhart, Joan Rivers and David Steinberg. Johnny Carson: King of Late Night is a nicely produced and incredibly worthwhile documentary that I recommend highly.
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