The 2015 Tony Award Ceremony will be broadcast live on CBS from Radio City Music Hall in New York on June 7. Who's hosting? Usually, this would have been announced months ago but it hasn't been yet. My deduction? They're waiting to see if Neil Patrick Harris can work it into his schedule. Given the mixed reaction he got to his Oscar hosting, he may decide he needs to remind people how good he is at that kind of thing. The Tony Awards are more "his room" and he's a lot more in control on those telecasts.
So now Samantha Bee is departing The Daily Show. I see a lot of speculation that all these departures were triggered by Jon Stewart's announcement that he would soon leave the host chair but Bee's deal, as well as the one involving her husband Jason Jones, had to have been in the works for some time. One wonders how long all these folks knew about Stewart stepping down before we knew about Stewart stepping down. I have the feeling that when Mr. Stewart made that announcement, he knew exactly who'd be taking over his chair — or at least knew of a short list of feasible, gettable replacements — and that he didn't make that announcement until he was confident there was someone who could keep the ship afloat.
I try from time to time but I still find Jimmy Kimmel unwatchable as a talk show host. Still, I admit his show's attacks on the anti-vax mob are very clever and probably effective.
Incidentally, last night Kimmel reran a show from February 25 where his lead guest was Will Smith while Jimmy Fallon reran a show from February 5 where his lead guest was Will Smith. David Letterman got a one-day jump on both of them. He reran his February 18 show with lead guest Will Smith the night before.
There's a probably-apocryphal story from back in the early seventies when there were four major late night talk shows, all emanating from New York: Merv Griffin's on CBS, Johnny Carson's on NBC, Dick Cavett's on ABC and David Frost's in syndication. The story is that thanks to staggered taping schedules, Jerry Lewis — who presumably had something to plug — managed to guest on all four on the same night.
I don't think that happened. I suspect Jerry did all four on one New York trip and they all aired close enough to one another that it was easily exaggerated into the same night. But Will Smith got on all three 11:30 network shows over three weeks and they all got rerun over two days. That's darn close to what Mr. Lewis is said to have accomplished.