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Theeere Was Johnny Nearly 100 stars from television’s formative years bring their stories to PBS 45 & 49 in a nostalgic four-part documentary series, Pioneers of Television. Watch it Wednesdays at 8 p.m., with repeats on Sundays at 8 p.m. and Tuesdays at 2 p.m. (or Fridays at 2 a.m. for the sleepless and the TiVo- and DVR-savvy).
When I was growing up, my father made his living as a restaurateur and usually arrived home late in the evening. Long after my mother sent us kids to bed, I would sit in the window at the foot of my bed and watch for my dad to come home. There I sat, alone in the darkness, filled with hope by the beam of every set of headlights that came down the street, waiting for the one car Dad was in — the one that meant he was home safely, the one that would finally allow me to go to sleep. Sweet, huh? Not to the neighbor who thought I was spying on her every night. But that’s another story. Anyway, two sounds always filled me with relief: the opening of the garage door followed shortly by the Johnny Carson theme song. That music came to signify security to me in such a deep way that I’d swear it’s still in my bloodstream. When the last Tonight Show With Johnny Carson aired on May 22, 1992, I cried through the whole program. In fact, the entire week of final shows was a sad vigil for me, spent in late-night television tears. I watched with my then boyfriend, Ted, who was mystified by my emotional response. I can still see him sitting on the couch, looking over at me incredulously and offering the occasional reminder, “It’s only a television show.” No, it wasn’t just another television show. Johnny Carson had been on the air for 30 years. In the four-network universe, The Tonight Show was a gathering place for Americans and a common point of reference. When Ted and I were kids, it was an off-limits, grown-ups-only pleasure and we longed to reach the age when we, too, were old enough to stay up late to watch and old enough to get the jokes and innuendos. And for me, idiosyncratically, the clockwork regularity of that show — synchronized, in my youth, with my father's arrival home every Monday through Friday night — came to mean that all was well in the world. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone who did not experience a sense of loss that week in 1992. For some of us, it was a rather unpleasant rite of passage that signaled the passing of time and the inevitability of change. It was also the first time I ever had a palpable sense of what my parents must have felt as the cultural icons of their youth drifted away and a feeling, maybe, that the world would eventually belong to another generation asking, “Whooo's Johnny?” Pioneers of Television remembers Johnny Carson, along with Steve Allen and Jack Paar, in Late Night on Wednesday, Jan. 9 at 8 p.m. (and again on Friday, Jan. 11 at 2 a.m.; Sunday, Jan. 13 at 8 p.m.; and Tuesday, Jan. 20 at 2 p.m.). You can read about all four episodes of the show here.
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