Word: paar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...show in 1954, The Tonight Show formed a template for late-night TV that everyone from Arsenio Hall to Jimmy Kimmel has since followed: witty banter, famous guests and eccentric sidekicks. Its first M.C., talk-show veteran Steve Allen, gave way just three years later to the unpredictable Jack Paar. In 1962, Paar left the show in the hands of a 36-year-old game-show host, Johnny Carson, who turned The Tonight Show from a success into a legend. (At one point, it accounted for 17% of NBC's revenue.) Carson's affable charm helped snag top-notch guests...
...Long before Fox News, TV was a medium of talk. Actress Dody Goodman, 93, played Louise Lasser's mother on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, but was better known as dizzy racontress on Jack Paar's late-night couch. Les Crane, 74, filled ABC's 11:30 slot against Johnny Carson with an issues show, contentiously thrusting his boom mike into the audience. Four decades later, the folksier Tony Snow, 53, hosted a Fox show as an out-of-town tryout for his job as White House Press Secretary. Jack Narz, 85, hosted the "fixed" game show Dotto; got rehabilitated...
Died. Jose Melis, 85, Havana-born bandleader for The Tonight Show whose affectionate bantering with host Jack Paar, an old Army buddy, set the model for Doc Severinsen, Paul Shaffer and other late-night musician sidekicks who followed; in Sun City, Ariz...
...Paar had been hot, mercurial, no surer of what he would do next than his audience. If he'd tangled with NBC earlier that day, or if his daughter Randy got her first training bra, he blurted it out on the air. The show's intimate, neurotic tone made watching Paar an energizing, enervating experience -Event Television.. Carson established order, control (one of his favorite words), an elastic predictability. After the Paar boil, Carson, with his sang froid and what Tynan calls "his cobra-swift one-liners," brought a cooler temperature to Tonight. He seemed to verify Marshall McLuhan...
...Under Carson, The Tonight Show became Habit Television, which is how the sponsors like it, and most viewers too. Not everyone wanted the Paar caffeine jolt after midnight; what's needed is a pleasing comedy sedative. The ratings underlined the acuity of Carson's choice. After 15 years his audience had nearly tripled Paar's, and accounted for 17% of NBC's revenue...