And if you want to see more memorable moments involving Johnny Carson, this website has a long list of them, many including video clips.  There is much there you will enjoy.

Here's an interesting moment from TV history. On May 23, 1991, NBC had one of their annual "up fronts" at Carnegie Hall in New York. Owners and representatives of almost all the NBC affiliates — and a lot of folks who did serious business with NBC — were present for a day-long show/convention to present and discuss the future of NBC. Stars of their current and pending shows appeared and then, near the end, Warren Littlefield — the guy then running the show and the network — introduced a surprise guest. It was Johnny Carson, who for three decades had been making NBC tons o' cash as the host of The Tonight Show.

As it turned out, Littlefield's surprise guest had a huge surprise for Littlefield. In his speech to everyone important at NBC at the moment, Johnny casually dropped the announcement that he was retiring at the end of his current deal. In hindsight, many of those present said, "We should have known" but no one did. The ones who sensed that Carson was nearing that moment did not dream that that was how they'd find out. Johnny's deal with NBC was structured so that when he did decide it was time to go, he'd still have another year (at least) on the air. They'd thought he'd tell them in private, then some sort of joint announcement would be made.

But that ain't how Johnny wanted to do it. He was going to announce it himself in a way that made it clear he, not NBC, was deciding it was time to step down. A lot of those at NBC weren't unhappy that Carson was going to go. His ratings weren't what they had been and his demographics were skewing older and older. It was easy to think that someone younger and a lot cheaper could do better in that job. Some of them were happy that it hadn't come down to the network having to ease Mr. Carson out the door. They just didn't like how and where he announced it.

Over at Rockefeller Center, David Letterman was taping his 12:35 show which followed Johnny's. He knew Johnny was in town and would, time permitting, be dropping by for a surprise appearance in the show they were taping but that wasn't definite. The second guest, Jim Carrey then a star of the Fox series, In Living Color, might get on or he might be bumped.  It depended on whether Johnny could get away from the affiliates gathering in time. During a commercial break though, Dave got the word: Johnny was en route to their studio, right on schedule. Dave was also told what Carson had announced from the stage at Carnegie Hall.

This is the segment that resulted. You'll see Dave start to introduce Jim Carrey, knowing full well a guy with the same initials is about to enter and Carrey isn't getting on. The camera even cuts to the door Johnny will be coming through just before he enters and Paul Shaffer is all primed to play Carson's theme song. It's a good piece of TV history with two men, obviously fond of each other, just chatting. Dave is prepared to ask Johnny a question about his time doing The Tonight Show in New York but most of it is pretty spontaneous.

And Johnny casually drops the info that he's heading into his last year on that show, not making a big deal out of it.

I found out about it shortly after the taping when a friend of mine on Letterman's staff, Rick Scheckman, called and told me to watch and record the show that night. I would have anyway because the news was all over TV news programs before Letterman's show aired. You could kind of feel the generations shift and The Late Night Wars commence…

As we all know, Carl Reiner created, produced, wrote and sometimes appeared on The Dick Van Dyke Show which debuted on October 3, 1961. It was on five seasons on CBS and the first run of its final episode aired on June 1, 1966. That series was enough to keep Mr. Reiner occupied throughout those five years…but it was hardly the only thing he did. He wrote and appeared in the movies The Thrill of It All and The Art of Love and did a cameo in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. He also starred in the movie, The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming, did voices on the Linus the Lionhearted cartoon show and guest-starred on a lot of other TV programs.

And, like that wasn't enough to keep a man busy, he had another TV series in addition to The Dick Van Dyke Show. Back in this post, we showed you a sample of The Celebrity Game, a weekly prime-time game show which bounced around the CBS schedule from April of '64 to September '65. It was used as times as a filler to replace some canceled show and was on and off the schedule at different times. CBS also did this with another prime-time game show, Stump the Stars.

Here's another episode. It's from 1965 and someone has colorized it. If it reminds you of the original Hollywood Squares, that may have a lot of do with it coming from the same producers and employing a lot of the same behind-the-camera people. Enjoy…

Every time I have to deal with some company's Customer Service people on the phone lately, I'm asked to stay on the line for a brief survey. When I do, they ask me questions about how satisfied I was with the person to whom I spoke…and that's all they ask. They never ask questions that would allow me to tell them in some way…

• Your automated service sucks and it took me an unacceptably long time to reach that person to whom I spoke.
• The person to whom I spoke was very nice and seemed eager to help but he or she couldn't get their computer to help me with my problem or they had to tell me they weren't empowered to help me or answer my question and they couldn't refer me to someone who could.

In other words, the problem wasn't with the human being I spoke to. It was with your crummy "let's hire as few humans as possible, perhaps even in some remote foreign country" policy.

In the incident this morning that prompted this message, I was trying to change the delivery date of something I ordered. The website would not let me change the date or cancel the order. The company's app on my iPhone also would not let me change the date or cancel the order. Finally — on their app for my iPad and only on their app for my iPad — I found a way not to change the date but to completely cancel the order. So I did and I then ordered the same thing from someone else.

I wonder how much business this cost them. They not only lost that sale but any future business I might give them.

My pal Jason Graae is one of the great stage performers…heard on an indecent number of original cast albums of musicals and in a great many shows. Also, for several years, he was the voice of the Leprechaun in the Lucky Charms commercials. After he lost the gig, he was motivated to sing about what it was like…

More medically-unsound and inaccurate assertions from Robert Kennedy, Jr., the Peter "Wrong Way" Peachfuzz of our National Health System. Whatever he says, the opposite is true.

Why U.S. farmers are so pissed about the huge bailouts to and meat imports from Argentina…and what it all has to do with soybeans,

FactCheck.org has compiled some "final" statistics about the economy under President Joe Biden. As I'm sure you'd expect, there are some pretty impressive numbers there, contrary to the hysterical claims of You-Know-Who and those who parrot what he says.

Mike Johnson and others keep claiming that the government shutdown is wholly because Democrats are insistent about giving free health care to undocumented immigrants. Not true.

Here's some info on the Vindictive Prosecutions of James Comey, Letitia James and John Bolton. Once upon a time, I never would have believed I'd be on the side of John "Let's bomb everyone!" Bolton but he's changed his views a lot.

JD Vance claims there's way more political-themed violence from The Left than there is from The Right. Here's why that ain't so.

Donald Trump, who claims to solve wars between nations that don't even know they're warring, insists "We’ve never had a president that solved one war, not one war." Why that's a load of crap.

Donald Trump claims that every time we sink a boat off the coast of Venezuela and kill most or all of the people on it, "we save 25,000 American lives." Why that's a load of crap. And here's Fred Kaplan explaining, to the extent anyone can explain it, why they're doing this.

Which Chief Exec secured the release of more hostages from Gaza, Biden or Trump? I'll bet you can guess.

And here's some probably-solid info on this year's COVID vaccines.

Sarah Smallwood Parsons is a singer, an Internet Star, a cabaret performer and a member of the Upright Citizens Brigade. Here — called to my attention by my buddy Vince Waldron — she favors us with a song we've all sat through at too many musical comedies…

I mentioned here the other day that I would love to see — or at least read the script of — an unsold pilot from 1971 (give or take a year) called either Bel Air Patrol or Eddie. It was written by Larry Gelbart and starred Phil Silvers and several other familiar actors including Fred Clark. Several folks wrote to tell me that it couldn't have been done in 1971, even giving or taking a year, because Fred Clark died in 1968.

One of the things I love about doing this blog is that I can mention something and my readers respond with a lot of additional information. Reader Mike Tennant also pointed out that another cast member, Nathaniel Frey, died in 1970. Tennant also located some info that the airing of the by-then-unsold pilot was originally scheduled to run on August 15, 1971 as an offering on a series called Comedy Playhouse. That was that season's summer anthology series via which CBS burned off unsold pilots they had on the shelf.

But it didn't air on that date because it was pre-empted by a news report and it instead wound up airing as the last episode of Comedy Playhouse, which was on September 5. His source — which is this webpage — refers to it as The Phil Silvers Show (aka Eddie) and says, "Silvers starred as Eddie Skinner, a security guard for a gated community who gets to live the life of a millionaire thanks to his employees. Patricia Barry co-starred."

By the way — and yes, I know I'm veering wildly off-topic in this post — I think I know why the 8/15/71 pre-emption. That was the day President Richard M. Nixon took America off the Gold Standard. This blog can be so educational at times.

It's also called The Phil Silvers Show on the cover of a copy of the script which is soon to be up for auction on eBay. It's advertised there now but bids haven't opened yet. When they do, I may try to purchase it but maybe one of you would like to buy it, scan it and send me a copy. If you do, here's the link to it which was sent to me by another reader of this site, Thomas Adams. The script, let us note, is dated November 10, 1966, which probably means it was a candidate for a mid-season pick-up that would start airing in early '67.

The earlier date is significant because Silvers suffered some sort of breakdown in the late sixties and spent many months in a sanitarium. He bowed out of a Don Knotts movie, The Love God, because of his problems and that film began shooting in September of 1968 with someone else in the role that was written for Mr. Silvers. It makes you suspect that a reason — and maybe the main one — for the pilot not selling is that its star wasn't up to performing. Or, I suppose, the failure of the pilot may have contributed to Silvers' depression.

In any case, he overcame the depression and then his agent began searching for some job via which Silvers could demonstrate that he was well and able to work. This led to Silvers starring in a limited-run revival of the musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, that played the Ahmanson Theater here in Los Angeles. I have written many times here about this production because I saw it on its second night — October 13, 1971 — and it's still the most wonderful, entertaining thing I ever saw on a stage. It later went to New York, opened on Broadway and was a smash hit that won Silvers a Tony Award…but it didn't have a long run because he had a stroke and show closed.

The whole story intrigues me and I talked about it with Gelbart (co-author of Forum) and with Silvers. Oddly enough, when we talked about the unsold pilot, neither one of them referred to it as The Phil Silvers Show. You'd think at least Phil would have.

If the show had run and had that title, it would have been the fourth series with that name (sorta). Silvers' first TV show, which didn't last long, was The Phil Silvers Arrow Show which ran for three whole weeks in 1948, the "Arrow" referring to its sponsor. Then the legendary show we know as Sgt. Bilko had three names during its four-season run — that, You'll Never Get Rich and The Phil Silvers Show.

Then Silvers tried to make the Bilko magic happen again with The New Phil Silvers Show which only lasted from September 28, 1963 to April 25, 1964. Oddly enough, though it flopped, it made Silvers more money than anything else he ever did. The deal he got from CBS that lured him back to weekly television included a provision that would give him half-ownership of some other series and that series wound up being Gilligan's Island. At the end of every episode in the credits, you'll see it identified as a co-production with "Gladasya Productions." That was Silvers' production company, named after his famous catch-phrase. It was also the reason he guest-starred on one episode.

I'm wandering off through Trivialand here so let me just wrap this up. I'm sorry he didn't get to do that fifth series about the security guard in Bel Air. After he recovered (mostly) from the stroke, he was able to act occasionally but he was never well enough to star in another weekly program. Hey, one of you buy that script on eBay and send me a copy. Or at least, let me know if it's any good.

John Oliver is off this week but he left us an online-only video to watch which is a sequel to this video he did some time ago complaining about sequels…

When I started this blog on December 18, 2000, its name was www.evanier.com — and that URL will still get you here. I changed it after a little while because I thought it was a little too self-referential and also because it might be unfair to the handful of people on this planet who share my surname.

In case you're interested, 12/18/2000 was 9,073 days ago so we're closing in on the 25th anniversary of this thing. Along the way, I've deleted a few posts but once this one goes up, there will be 33,465 posts on this blog of which 268 are "encore" reruns. So that's 33,197 unique posts here or an average of a little over 3.6 posts per day.

I'm trying to think of something really special I can do here on December 18, 2025 and so far, the best thing I've come up with is a long and penetrating essay about our new President. If you can do something to help get rid of the guy who's in office now by then, I'd appreciate it — and we don't have to wait until the middle of December. Thank you.

The up-and-coming comedian Jerry Seinfeld, who is about to star in a sitcom titled with just his last name, makes an appearance on David Letterman's show…

Stu West sent the following…

When Diane Keaton died recently, I learned about an unaired HBO pilot from around 2010 that featured Keaton as a Hollywood blogger who definitely wasn't a thinly-fictionalized Nikki Finke, honest. And another unaired HBO pilot from around the same time, The Miraculous Year, which featured Frank Langella as a Broadway composer who for legal reasons was absolutely not Stephen Sondheim.

I'd like to see both of those. Now that you've been able to watch the Some Like It Hot pilot, do you have any remaining white whales among the unaired tv episodes that you'd still like to track down?

The first one that comes to mind is that around 1971, give or take a year, Phil Silvers starred in a pilot that was called either Bel Air Patrol or Eddie. Phil, when I brunched him the one time, called it the latter. Larry Gelbart, who wrote the pilot, called it by the former title. Both said it was a terrific pilot that would have yielded a terrific series had the folks at CBS been wise enough to buy it.

What I know about it is that Silvers played Eddie Skinner, a retired cop who's now running a private security service in the wealthy gated community of Bel Air. He's loved by all the servants who work there and the cooks and maids feed him and his squad when the homeowners for whom they work are away. In return, Eddie uses his Bilkoesque fast-talking skills to aid these servants when they get into trouble. The cast included Fred Clark, Frank Faylen, Edward Andrews, Joanna Barnes, Patricia Barry, Guy Raymond and Nathaniel Frey. And the pilot was directed by Hy Averback.

It apparently was run — once and only once — on one of those the networks used to have where they'd burn off unsold pilots. I never saw it and when Gelbart told me about it, he said, "I'll dig out the script for it and send you a copy" and I never saw that, either. So I dunno if it was as wonderful as either man said but I have to think a pilot starring Phil Silvers and written by Larry Gelbart must have some redeeming qualities. If anyone has a copy, you know where to reach me.

The New York Times goes over some of the faulty data that keeps finding its way into Trump speeches and press releases. No wonder he wants to control what the news media can report.

I don't recall when I became a fan of Drew Friedman's celebrity cartooning but it was not long after I first saw him in one of my favorite magazines — National Lampoon, I suspect. I was attracted for two reasons, one being the way he captured likenesses so well. And the other was that his choice of celebs to draw and the contexts into which he drew them suggested that that Friedman guy liked a lot of the same movie stars, Old Jewish Comedians, names-in-the-news and even other cartoonists that I liked. Also, I didn't have to get out the magnifying glass and search for NINAs in the hair and clothing of those he caricatured.

I later got to meet Drew and liked the artist, as well. So I really enjoyed a new documentary about him — Drew Friedman: The Vermeer of the Borscht Belt. It's not too long, the way a lot of those documentaries are and it's filled with famous folks talking about what an honor it was to be drawn by Drew. either in his early "stipple style" period or later when he developed a wider range of techniques. (Before I watched the video, I wondered if it would address his changeover and, yes, it does.) It's currently viewable, as is just about everything, on Amazon but also just about anywhere you'd expect to see this kind of thing. I recommend you seek it out.

A little less than two years ago on this site, we got to talking about an unsold pilot made in 1961. It was for a sitcom based on the movie, Some Like It Hot and it had Vic Damone playing the role played by Tony Curtis in the movie and Dick Patterson in role played by Jack Lemmon. That seems like a weird idea but then to some, so did the idea of turning The Odd Couple and M*A*S*H and a few others into TV shows.

What was bizarre about this transformation is that the pilot for this Some Like It Hot started with Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon — unbilled — playing the same characters they played in the movie. Then in the first scene, they undergo plastic surgery and when the bandages are removed, turn into Vic Damone and Dick Patterson. That, it's explained, is how they will hide out from gangsters still trying to kill them. There is no explanation of how their voices and, I think, their heights change.

I wrote about this bizarre unsold pilot here and said I wished I could see it sometime. Well, I finally did and now you can, too. A nice copy is now on YouTube and I've embedded it below. It has a lot of good character actors in it including Peter Leeds, Jack Albertson, Mike Mazurki, Fritz Feld, Robert Strauss, Jerry Paris, Herb Ellis, George Liberace and, of all people, Rudy Vallee. Plus Tina Louise takes over the Marilyn Monroe role and Joan Shawlee plays the character portrayed in the movie by Joan Shawlee.

Someone spent a lot of money to make this and I'd love to know how they got Lemmon and Curtis to be in it and what Billy Wilder thought of the whole enterprise. I can see why it didn't sell and if you watch it, maybe you'll see too…