Word: shows
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Hall raises a clenched fist and rotates it in a circle, inspiring the crowd to respond with its trademark barking chant: "Wooh! Wooh! Wooh!" He races over to bandleader Michael Wolff and greets him by touching index fingers. (No old-fashioned high-fives on The Arsenio Hall Show.) He bounds in and out of the audience, paying special attention to the folks in the bad seats behind the band. By the end of his opening monologue, the crowd is wired. Johnny Carson signals the start of his show with a decorous golf swing. Hall launches the proceedings with...
...seeing the future of the TV talk show, and it is, well, funky. The Arsenio Hall Show, a weeknightly joyride on 167 stations nationwide, is less a talk show than a televised party: hip, hyperkinetic and hot. The host can't sit still, and the crowd can't get enough of him. At any moment, Hall might race into the studio audience in response to a shouting fan, or sidle over to his five-piece house band ("my posse") for some impromptu jamming. Meanwhile, as late-night's first successful black talk host, he has turned his guest couch into...
Since its debut last January, The Arsenio Hall Show has passed both Pat Sajak and David Letterman in the ratings, to take the No. 2 slot behind Carson's venerable Tonight show. Hall's show ranks No. 1 among the important under-35 audience. "I take the view that the public has elected me as a new late-night talk-show host," he says enthusiastically. "I've worked all my life preparing for it, putting together a platform -- my kind of guests, my kind of music, what I think is funny. I've been warming...
...industry is getting the message. Rather than merely redistribute the existing late-night audience, Hall's show has attracted new viewers. Some urban contemporary radio stations have noticed a drop in their listenership when Hall is on the air. The inevitable TV imitators are starting to appear, notably The Byron Allen Show on CBS, a Saturday-night talk show with another black comic as host. Even fuddy-duddies like Carson and Sajak seem to be feeling the heat. Would rock acts like Simply Red and Stevie B. have been booked in the days before Hall...
...that Carson is in imminent danger of losing his title as late-night king. After soaring during the summer, Hall's ratings have slacked off a bit this fall. (The kids who constitute his main audience, explain show executives, have gone back to school.) Through it all, Tonight's ratings have remained relatively stable. "This race is not a sprint, it's a marathon," notes Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment. "Whatever burns the brightest, fades the fastest...