The Curiously Limited Shelf Life of Talk Show Hosts

I recently watched a godawful romantic comedy called The Remake for The Fractured Mirror, my upcoming book about American movies about the film industry. It’s a vanity project written, directed and starring an actress of a certain age whose film appearances had mostly been as an extra up to that point and her real-life husband. 

Famous people are particularly indulgent when it comes to appearing in movies about their industry. So I was impressed but not entirely surprised that despite the godawful script, tiny budget and amateurish lead players the movie somehow snagged such familiar faces as Sally Kellerman, June Lockhart, in what turned out to be her final onscreen role, Fast Time at Ridgemont High’s Robert Romanus and Larry King. 

Larry King plays the same role here that he plays in all of the many movies and television shows he appears in: Larry King. He plays himself, or rather a fictionalized version of himself in a montage or scene in which the fame and popularity of a fictional character is dramatized by having Larry King grill them about some fictional development. 

For a solid decade, at least, having Jay Leno, Jon Stewart and Bill Maher make glib, often mean-spirited jokes at the expense of a film’s characters reigned as lazy short-hand for rising fame and/or being well-known enough for popular talk show hosts to crack wise about you without audiences wondering, “Who the hell is that?”

These cameos served multiple purposes. They ostensibly make fictional scenarios and characters seem more real and authentic by weaving them into the fabric of our real pop culture and they make themselves seem more impressive and real by getting cameos from world-famous performers. 

These cameos are often only a snarky line or two, the kind of thing that can be knocked off in a half hour at most but, in a weird way they may represent their most enduring legacy.

That’s because people will re-watch even the stupidest movie decades after its release, assuming it is in wide circulation, but talk shows, and consequently talk show hosts, have a curiously limited shelf life. 

Talk shows are disposable by design. They entertain you in the moment and then you never see them again. Oh sure, there may be reruns to give the hosts breaks but because of the timeliness and sheer volume of talk shows, individual episodes lose the vast majority of their power, value and currency the night after they air and are replaced by an even timelier episode. 

I grew up at the tail end of the Johnny Carson era, when he was so popular that it was seen as downright un-American to compete against him, particularly if the would-be rival in question was a woman (like Joan Rivers) or a Canadian (like Alan Thicke). 

Yet the massive footprint Carson made on pop culture during his reign as the most popular, important and successful talk show in American history receded immediately after he left the air. 

Carson was fondly remembered during a fairly reclusive retirement but his life’s work belonged squarely and unmistakably in the past, when it had its massive influence. 

When I worked at Blockbuster as a teenager we had a signed Best-Of that I wish I held onto that summed up decades of Carson’s reign on a few chintzy videocassettes. Carson was the biggest and the best but he was doomed to be semi-forgotten like the rest. 

My kids will probably have no real conception of who Carson was beyond references beyond parodies on Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons. Heck, my wife, who is seven years younger than me, probably has only a vague sense of who Johnny Carson was and why he was so important. 

Because of the inherent timeliness and disposability of talk shows their influence and visibility recede dramatically with time. 

That’s why I think it will be hard to impress upon future generations just what an important cultural figure Jon Stewart was or how brilliant The Colbert Report was at its best when they’ll likely know talk show hosts vaguely as people who cheese it up in mediocre old movies. 

As a professional connoisseur of failure I wish that I could watch the entire runs of Jerry Lewis and Chevy Chase’s ill-fated, notorious, short-lived talk shows. 

I would love, love, love to drink in the exquisite awkwardness and write about it for My World of Flops. But folks don’t re-watch the huge successes, let alone the catastrophes. 

It’s not unlike how I was told growing up that Jack Paar was super important and subversive and influential yet I’ve seen at most a few episodes of his show. I know of the pre-Carson talk show hosts only by reputation, as people who were important on television and then their work began to fade out of the public memory, like the photo of the McFly siblings in Back to the Future. 

That means that talk show hosts who were feted as giants of entertainment while they were active will likely be remembered not for the complex, significant figures they were but rather for playing goofy caricatures of themselves in silly movies. 

That doesn’t seem fair but it does seem inevitable. 

Of course fans of talk show hosts keep them alive in their hearts and their memories even if they don’t re-watch their shows on a regular basis, or ever, and that is perhaps a more meaningful form of immortality. 

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Control Nathan Rabin 4.0October 16, 2023