Jay Leno was an incorrigible workaholic. According to Bill Carter’s book “The War for Late Night,” during his more than 20 years as the host of “The Tonight Show” on NBC, Leno could spend five hours straight just choosing material for each evening’s program, poring over jokes until someone dragged him to rehearsal. He hated vacations and rarely went to parties. When the show was between seasons, he spent his time off working the comedy-club circuit. “Some might call him a robot, with no apparent inner life at all,” Carter wrote. “Jay didn’t care, nor did he even seem to disagree all that much.”
This temperament was ideally suited to 20th-century late-night television. The format demanded a certain neutrality — an ability to guide viewers through topical comedy, celebrity interviews and musical guests with studied indifference. A good host was hospitable and charismatic but also faintly aloof and self-effacing, delivering jokes and banter without ever revealing much of an opinion beyond a general air of wry, winking judgment. As Leno understood it, audiences tuned in for his attitude, not his perspective. He didn’t need an inner monologue — just an opening one.
This kind of host is a dying breed. That’s partly because late-night TV itself is dying and has been for a while. As far back as 2018, when Conan O’Brien was preparing to revamp his TBS show, he declared that the traditional late-night talk show “doesn’t make sense anymore,” noting that young people would rather watch clips on social media than tune in for linear programming. This year’s developments certainly seem to confirm the format’s slow demise. In March, the comedian Taylor Tomlinson announced that she would be leaving “After Midnight” behind, with CBS declining to search for a replacement. In July, Stephen Colbert’s announcement that CBS was canceling “The Late Show” caused an uproar, but insiders have said that the series had been losing tens of millions dollars per year and was already on its way out.
The primary functions of the late-night show have been redistributed to other media. If you want punch lines about the news, you can scroll through X. If you want to hear an actor talk about his latest movie, you can listen to a podcast. If you want comedy skits or stupid pet tricks, you can swipe through TikTok.
The mainstays of this 21st-century entertainment and the hosts of late-night shows are simply different species.
But the one aspect of these shows that hasn’t been neatly replaced is the host — the congenial, disinterested figurehead who shepherds us through a medley of entertainment with a comforting, trustworthy smirk. Decades ago, these hosts were easy enough to criticize as smarmy stuffed shirts. But the further that we, and the remaining late-night shows, move from that arrangement, the more the old-school host looks like one of the last television jobs unspoiled by a cult of personality, occupied by some of the last people whose private lives, opinions and partisan preferences could remain obscure. Now that seemingly every last subject can become a battlefield in a culture war, it’s easier to appreciate what the old broadcast host was meant to be: the ultimate impartial observer, chuckling at everything and coyly letting us all in on the joke.
“The Tonight Show” premiered in 1954, hosted first by Steve Allen — but it wasn’t until Johnny Carson became the host, in 1962, that the show became a cultural institution, ultimately watched by millions of Americans in the quiet hours before bed. Carson had a cool affect and an easy, unpretentious style. On air, he wasn’t opinionated or strong-willed; his default register was a sort of glib amusement. He was also famously withholding. “Johnny Carson on TV is the visible eighth of an iceberg called Johnny Carson,” a former colleague on “The Tonight Show” told Kenneth Tynan in a New Yorker profile of the host. That capacity to captivate viewers while concealing so much of himself formed the model of the late-night host for decades to come.
Leno’s reign on “Tonight” followed the formula: According to Carter, he described his duties as “write joke; tell joke; cash check.” (He also insisted that the show be called “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” rather than “The Tonight Show Starring Jay Leno.”) But even the more assertive David Letterman — whose shows on NBC and, later, CBS had an ironic, anarchic sensibility that could border on the avant-garde — had a hosting style no less broadly impersonal than Leno’s. He adhered to an unspoken rule of the format: Don’t make it about you. In the fall of 2009, when he was the victim of an extortion attempt, Letterman took 14 minutes of the show to offer a blunt explanation of the situation, confessing to having sexual relationships with staff members and apologizing to them and to his wife — then plowed onward.
Consider how different all of this is from standard operating procedure among the other people we pay attention to today. On podcasts and YouTube and most every other place we go to listen to people talking, hosts have become brands in and of themselves, in some of the same ways radio shock jocks and political firebrands were in decades past. We are expected to relate to them as if they were friends, people whose lives and views we have come to know intimately and feel invested in. Listen to Joe Rogan or Alex Cooper, Marc Maron or Theo Von, and you will learn as much about their opinions and preoccupations as you do about any of their guests’; you are spending time in the hosts’ world. Streamers like Kai Cenat and IShowSpeed are endlessly speaking their minds. Even the mega-popular MrBeast, whose web series is basically a game show, mines his personal life for content, serving as both host and subject of his own stunts. The mainstays of this 21st-century entertainment and the hosts of late-night shows are simply different species: One talks for a living, the other listens.
This is the field on which late night’s erstwhile hosts are forced to compete. O’Brien moved from TV to the podcast “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend.” After departing “The Daily Show,” Trevor Noah introduced a weekly podcast called “What Now?” When Tomlinson stepped down from “After Midnight,” she explained her decision by saying that she wanted to focus on standup — another sphere full of personal takes and self-revelation. Even Leno was funneled into the YouTube ecosystem, showing more of himself than anybody would have thought possible on a diaristic, car-based show called “Jay Leno’s Garage.”
Late-night television has tried, at times, to bend to this reality. Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers have all been more openly partisan than the form used to get. Tomlinson’s program leaned into the sorts of gamelike chat formats found on comedy podcasts and British panel shows. Most every show abandoned the chummy hangout vibe of an old Carson broadcast to chase after stunts and gags that might go viral online the next morning, like having celebrities play games (Jimmy Fallon), read mean tweets about themselves (Kimmel) or sing karaoke in a car (James Corden). In some precincts, things remain breezily impartial: Fallon hosts “The Tonight Show” like the platonic ideal of a Leno successor. But you also get the distinct sense that he and his peers are quietly riding out the decline of institutions that will one day be deemed obsolete.
The format is an inevitable casualty of the decline of broadcast TV more generally. The live bands, the actors promoting their new movies, the monologues about current events — all of these we can find elsewhere. But as late-night recedes, so does one thing that I suspect our culture may eventually come to miss: the gracious host who had an attitude but not a philosophy, someone about whom you knew little and felt no urge to learn more. This was one of few realms in which we could enjoy a temperament instead of a whole worldview. That job no longer seems to exist, and we haven’t found many viable alternatives for it.
Calum Marsh is a writer and editor who specializes in art, culture and sports.
Source photographs for illustration above: Scott Kowalchyk/CBS Photo Archive, via Getty Images; Erik Voake/CBS Photo Archive, via Getty Images; Kevin Winter/Getty Images; NBCUniversal, via Getty Images; Jeffrey R. Staab/CBS, via Getty Images; iStockphoto/Getty Images; Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images; Prasert Krainukul/Getty Images; Gustavo Muniz/Getty Images.
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