These days, late-night TV is stuck at home with the rest of us.
It’s given us some good moments –
like Stephen Colbert and John Oliver riffing off one another,
while staring in opposite directions.
Are you wearing pants these days?
What kind of pants? What’s the bar for pants now?
Or Conan O’Brien reading a bedtime story to give parents a night off.
- You’re gonna love this kids.
It’s a four-volume set.
But it’s also shown a major limitation of late-night television.
The gags, the contrived exchanges and the endless plugging of products
for sale that make late-night what it is today, don’t work outside
the glitz and glam of a studio.
I couldn't find products that were luxurious and really effective.
A lot of these at-home late-night show recordings
are actually pretty endearing.
The shows are low production and learning to rely more on talent than, say,
showmanship.
That said, I think late-night shows are missing an opportunity to
recalibrate and focus on something missing from the genre:
really smart conversation, not just entertaining conversation.
And for that, we don’t have to look any further than late-night’s history itself,
to a guy The New York Times called,
“the last great intellectual talk show host,” Dick Cavett.
♪♪
Late-night talk shows evolved from the
variety shows of the 1940s and '50s,
which showcased a variety of acts,
including magic tricks, comedy sketches
and musical numbers.
Coming out of that, "Tonight Starring Steve Allen"
and Johnny Carson's "The Tonight Show"
led the way in creating a new format.
The monologue, the chairs framing the host's desk, the house band,
the host's throw to prearranged
anecdotes – it's all very formulaic and weirdly reassuring.
It seems to ensure that the show won't contain anything so troubling that it
might keep you awake after it's over.
But late-night was once home to this show,
where the moments didn't feel scripted or contrived.
- The Dick Cavett Show
♪♪
- When you mention the national anthem and talk about
playing in any unorthodox way,
- That's not unorthodox, that's not unorthodox.
- It isn't unorthodox? -No, no.
I thought it was beautiful.
Let's show him! Let's show him! -No, please.
I really don't think this is necessary.
What time is it?
- We have to face up to the fact that we cannot conduct
a unilateral military course of action around the world
without the world organizing against us. We've got to get out of Asia.
[applause]
This is the truth. My son came home with a drawing and said -
showed me this strange looking woman flying around.
I said, "What is it?" He said, "It's Lucy in the sky with diamonds."
I thought that's beautiful.
All breasts sag eventually.
[laughter]
Wait a minute.
[drum beat]
Wait, wait, wait, no... Don't go yet.
For almost a decade, between 1968 and 1975, “The Dick Cavett Show”
created a wide platform for conversations that went beyond
celebrity and into, I’d like to think, struggles over questions that spoke to
every facet of this country's soul.
It wasn't like anything else at the time, or arguably, since.
I think you do a yeoman's job. There's nobody else on television
that does what you do.
[applause]
I've got friends that are Black and white, and admirers,
and they're none of them bigots.
May I now answer? - Yes.
If I called any of your admirers bigots
who are not bigots, I apologize.
Maybe as Americans we are just as capable of atrocities, of mistakes
as all the other people in the world. We're no better, but we're no worse.
Cavett got his start in conventional late-night, writing for Johnny Carson
and Jack Paar – the two mainstays of late-night at the time.
- All right.
[drum beat]
[audience laughter]
I didn't even know you were Jewish!
[audience laughter]
Soon, he got his very own show,
and very quickly he began to differentiate himself from the rest.
Typically, late-night show hosts conducted interviews behind a desk
with seats appearing higher than those of the guests'.
After his first year on air, Cavett ditched the desk and placed
the seats directly across one another.
The effect was an immediate, intimate ambiance, which was at the
core of how Cavett worked.
He wanted to make his interactions with his guests feel more like conversations
than interviews, as per advice from his former boss, Jack Paar.
He said, "Kid, you're gonna do a talk show,
don't do interviews. Make it a conversation." he said.
He also wasn't a comedian by trade, like many late-night show hosts were.
So he rarely stood in front of his audience to deliver
a carefully crafted monologue.
He was a writer, and he thought like one.
He didn't use gotcha moments or look for a cheap laugh or lead
whatever it was he was discussing toward a punchline.
He did use humor, his own, which was highbrow and deadpan.
Were you happy with the way "The Godfather" came out?
I'd rather not talk about movies. I don't think they're...
[chuckles]
OK.
If we could figure out some way -
Did you like the book, "The Godfather?"
[audience laughter and applause]
And Cavett's style, the platform he provided, didn't go unappreciated.
He was able to get some of the most elusive filmmakers, musicians, actors
and artists, many of whom were part of alternative or youth culture
and ignored by mainstream media.
Very nice to see you, my little songbird.
[laughter]
Cavett's curation of American thought and culture would have been
incomplete without his willingness to tackle what other hosts may
have seen as disruptive or controversial.
I tell them I'd rather be with you than all the rest, because you don't ask
no tough questions. You're real nice.
[audience laughter]
Although most American households had a TV by the 1960s, there were
only three channels, ABC, NBC and CBS to serve nearly 200 million people.
That meant that the route to survival was to get as large an
audience as possible. And that meant:
Don't piss anyone off.
Jack Paar was too polite to ask pointed questions.
Merv Griffin was dedicated to interviewing the older generation of entertainers
– mostly glamorous Hollywood stars.
And Johnny Carson...
I think one of the dangers, if you are a comedian, which basically I am,
if you start to take yourself too seriously,
um... and start to comment on social issues,
your sense of humor suffers somewhere.
Even if Cavett did see himself as a sort of entertainer,
he cared deeply about what was happening in the country during the
'60s and '70s.
The Vietnam War,
the civil rights struggle,
violent suppression of protesters,
Watergate.
And so, Cavett leaned into tackling difficult subjects.
I think that anybody who gets into combat, anybody who hears the
bullets whistling over his head and sees one of his friends killed
or has a friend lying dying beside him with his eyes just looking up
at you saying, "Why?"
I think anybody who senses these things can't help but feel
a total revulsion for the absurdity and stupidity of men shooting at other men.
So why must we always concentrate on color or religion?
Or this... There are other ways of connecting men.
I don't know what most white people in this country feel,
but I can only conclude what they feel from the state of their institutions.
I don't know whether the labor unions and their bosses really hate me.
That doesn't matter. But I know I’m not in their unions.
I don't know if the real estate lobbyists have anything against Black people,
but I know the real estate lobbyists keep me in the ghetto.
And he didn't ignore difficult guests.
Why don't you look at your question sheet and ask a question?
Hey, can I talk to the audience -
Why don't you fold it five ways and put it where the moon don't shine?
[audience applause]
Through prioritizing unfiltered conversation,
ditching the mainstay platitudes of celebrity interviews
and being undaunted by the prospect of general discomfort,
Cavett's show was able to curate a series of conversations critical
to changes happening in the country.
And it helped that people wanted to be on his show.
They weren't there to promote a new film, or book or album,
but to engage in issues of social and political importance.
His own candor also revealed his own biases and discomforts,
especially on race, showing the limitations of his
proud progressive liberalism.
Like when, in a conversation
with James Earl Jones,
he commented on the controversy
over Anthony Quinn wearing
blackface to play a Haitian emperor.
Saying it was a terrible idea for him to play a Black man on the screen
because Black people should play it, it would take away from Black pride
and all of that if a white man were to play a Black man.
And I think this is nonsense.
Or when he discussed the N-word with Eddie Murphy.
Are you offended by the word n*gga in it?
Why are you... why?
[audience laughter]
Where did that come from?
Did I say that?
- He's like posessed. - Sorry.
[audience laughter]
His passion for trying to understand this country meant
he was one of the first people to report on Watergate.
His impact on raising awareness about the scandal was highlighted
in the 2014 PBS documentary, "Dick Cavett’s Watergate."
Hello, I'm Dick Cavett, and I can't believe where I am at this moment.
And the Nixon administration noticed.
It's hard to look at Cavett and not compare him and his show
to what we have today:
a late-night show landscape where entertainment is defined
not as an intellectual and earnest engagement with people
who shape our cultural lives, but as creating neatly packaged
moments that are viral, brief and comforting.
We've gone from this:
Can't you just about give a yes/no answer to the Vietnam War
was not worth it?
To this:
[drum roll]
In a 2018 interview with "The A.V. Club," even Cavett himself
lamented the state of late-night.
Now you turn on a talk show, somebody comes on and plugs their
movie and says the word "exciting" seven times and leaves.
And yes, with hundreds of channels on cable, there's been a fragmentation
which has created not only variety but also pressure to be
concise, flashy, entertaining.
Fewer people are watching late-night in real time.
More of us watch the excerpts on YouTube.
When the conversations do get a bit political, there's still this wariness
of alienating the nightly audience.
And so, the depth and range of any political exploration is limited.
What we get is witty, entertaining, political commentary
– not a wrangling of ideas.
Dick Cavett's interviews can be found today on YouTube,
and there, they've been given a new life.
And I think that's not only because of the breadth of personalities he was
able to bring on his show, but also the conversation.
Talking without trying to sell you something
whether a product or personality, is a lost art many are still searching for.
♪♪
So yes, Dick Cavett is absolutely
the late-night G.O.A.T.
Who do you think actually does a
pretty good job of coming close to him?
Let us know in the comments.
Don't forget to like, share and subscribe,
and come back next week
when we have another episode
of "Pop Americana."
♪♪