Here's a link to an article in the Wall Street Journal by Jeffrey Zaslow about guests on late night TV shows. I think this thing really misses the mark, in part due to faulty examples. Zaslow's premise is that the folks who book guests on talk shows are unfairly ignoring older, veteran performers. Here's a quote in case you don't feel like clicking over…
Such is the fate for scores of performers who once entertained America in 10-minute bursts on late-night TV. They're still alive. They still have fans who see their acts in Branson, Mo., or on cruise ships. But today's talk-show bookers often want nothing to do with them. As David Letterman and Jay Leno fight for the same parade of young actors, the old guard yearns for a return to the couches of their youth.
There's some validity to that but, first of all, the examples are bad ones: Charles Nelson Reilly, Phyllis Diller, Soupy Sales, Buddy Hackett, Yakov Smirnoff and The Amazing Kreskin. With the possible exception of Hackett, those are all guests that even Carson stopped booking long before he went off the air or never booked in the first place. A check of the guest database at www.johnnycarson.com shows that though Reilly was a frequent guest with Johnny for years, The Tonight Show last booked him in 1986, and Phyllis Diller in 1985. Johnny left the air in 1992.
Soupy Sales was never a regular guest on any of the late night shows, even when he had the hottest kid show in the country. He did afternoon shows once in a while but even that was a long time ago. And I'll say this delicately but I'll say it: He's not in the kind of health that would allow him to go on one of those shows today and delight his fans. He did Rosie O'Donnell's program a few months ago and it was a short, uncomfortable interview.
As for the other folks, I suspect that Yakov Smirnoff's absence from the tube has more to do with the fact that the end of the Cold War rendered his act moot. Mr. Kreskin long ago turned into a parody of himself. (Carson stopped booking him in 1980.) Buddy Hackett is turning up regularly with Craig Kilborn on The Late, Late Show.
The article's thesis is almost right. Talk shows often ignore older guests in favor of young ones. But the cases cited are mainly folks who burned out long ago and, besides — and here's what Zaslow misses completely — that's how show business works. Jerry Lewis and Mickey Rooney are not starring in movies and Wayne Newton does not have a record on the charts. Some performers endure and some do not.
The late night shows often find room for Rodney Dangerfield, Bob Newhart, Don Rickles and Tony Bennett. They never found much room for Smirnoff and even if they did once, some performers simply cannot sustain careers. Carson stayed on as long as he did, in part because he'd decide — rightly or wrongly — that certain stars simply had worn out their welcome and it was time to stop inviting them to his couch. If there was evidence that the mass public still loved Yakov and Kreskin and would flock to see them elsewhere, they might be right that Leno and Letterman are unfairly ignoring them. But those guys are playing Branson and Laughlin because they can't even fill a room in Vegas.
The talk shows are just booking the folks who seem to be popular. Maybe they're wrong at times. Hell, I'm sure they're wrong at times. But it's nothing new. That's how the game has always been played.