Word: carsons
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Leno became the obvious choice for NBC. His ratings showed that he kept Carson's core audience and also attracted some younger, more affluent viewers. Leno is more in synch with the zeitgeist: Letterman's pervasive irony seems less suited to the '90s than Leno's sincerity. For NBC, giving Letterman the job was a lose-lose proposition: the network would lose Late Night with David Letterman, the best and most profitable late-late-night show on TV, and it would lose Leno...
Leno roams the Tonight show set like a kid at summer camp. After makeup at 4 p.m., he always stops by to see his guests, something Carson rarely does. At 5, still in blue jeans, he bounds onstage to warm up the audience. "People say you should only let the audience see you for the first time at the beginning of the show," he says, which is the way the more reclusive Carson does it. "But, hey, they've been sitting there for half an hour. And if you bomb with the studio audience, you die all over America...
Come May 25, the show will be renamed The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, a subtle prepositional shift from its current title, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Jazzman Branford Marsalis, who will be the music director, has already written a funky new theme song. A new set will replace the old one. Ed McMahon will be gone, to be replaced by no one. Leno has earned the chance to occupy Johnny's chair, but now he must prove he can fill it. Although the show is an institution, it is Carson's institution, and Leno must make...
Although he may never admit it, his goal seems to be to join the grand Will Rogers-Bob Hope succession of American comedy, as a kind of spokesman for the national sensibility. He would like to stand for his generation the way Hope -- and Carson -- did for theirs. If so, he is moving into the right seat...
...Carson rounds off an amazing, influential and unforgettable 30 years...