Starting January 1, the cable channel Antenna TV is running old Tonight Shows with Johnny Carson. Weeknights, they have one-hour episodes at 11 PM which rerun at 2 AM Eastern. That's 8 PM and 11 PM Pacific. Weekend nights, they have 90-minute episodes starting at 10 PM and they rerun them at 1:30 AM Eastern, so 7 PM and 10:30 PM Pacific. The shows are not being run in chronological order.
The first hour episode on Friday night, January 1, is a 1982 episode with Eddie Murphy and McLean Stevenson. The first 90-minute episode on Saturday night is from 1975 and the guests are Foster Brooks, Victor Buono, Adela Rogers St. Johns and Joan Embery with animals from the San Diego Zoo.
If you want to take a Season Pass on your TiVo or set your DVR to grab them all, the name of the show seems to be Johnny Carson, not The Tonight Show. And while you're at it, you might also want to record Heeere's Johnny!, a pretty good half-hour preview special that Antenna TV is running a few times over the next week or so. You might have trouble finding it on your DVR listings if you don't type that name the way I just spelled it. It features brief interviews with Bob Newhart, Doc Severinsen, Jay Leno, Ted Koppel and others.
Press info says that the shows will be almost complete; that someone went to a lot of trouble and expense to clear the rights to all or maybe almost all the music. It does worry me a tad that the preview special carefully avoids any original music, not even using Johnny's theme. But I suppose the regular reruns are what matter.
I'm not sure these old shows will stand up. There will be references to then-topical matters which even I, a devout Carson watcher with a great memory, will have trouble comprehending. Also, I'm wondering if Carson's legend hasn't been so overhyped that the actual shows will disappoint some people…or that their disconnect with today won't make them seem too distant for some people.
One of the great things about Johnny was that when something happened in the news, he was almost always the first one anywhere to have a joke about it. That lack of immediacy always made his reruns at the time a little less wonderful to me…and of course now, everything will be ancient history. Also, so much of what Johnny did has become Standard Operating Procedure for talk shows that what he did may seem old hat to many, as might his shows' slower pace.
I hope they do well. I've tried watching the old Merv Griffin Shows that GetTV is running and found that Merv spent a lot of time with guests who didn't interest me then and still don't. But then Johnny always interested me a lot more than Merv. I hope, if only for my sake, he still does.
The test for me will be on Sunday, January 3. That's when Antenna TV is running a 90-minute show from 1974 with this guest list: Bob Hope, Don Rickles, Freddie Prinze, Michael Landon and Carol Wayne…and I suppose Carol Wayne means there'll be a Tea Time Movie. If I don't enjoy that, I'll decide old Carson shows just don't age well.