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It was obvious when Johnny Carson called it quits that an era had passed, but I don’t think anyone suspected at the time that the whole atmosphere of late night television had completely vanished into the ether. We were counting on Letterman to carry the torch, but he had already peaked a decade earlier. Conan O’Brien and Jon Stewart notwithstanding (and you could argue for Adult Swim as well), there’s not much point to late night television anymore. It’s just another hour of the day.
As a young person, the idea that people were awake, well-dressed and doing things at 11:30 PM was incredibly alluring. It was a secretive world that opened up in your living room or bedroom. Beyond The Tonight Show there were a lot of ultracool syndicated programmes buried in late night schedules on independent TV stations (independent TV stations have also gone the way of the dodo because of Fox, UPN and the WB). My first ITC exposure was a grainy rerun of My Partner the Ghost, more commonly known as Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased), running at 3:00 AM on WUAB sometime in 1982. Of course, SCTV was always shown in these obscure timeslots—I can remember the second season opener when it aired in Cleveland on WEWS at 11:30 on a Sunday night, and a third season episode or two at 1 AM or so on a Saturday morning. There’s nothing unique running in after hours now, even with a vastly-expanded number of channels and networks. It’s all infomercials or second showings from earlier in the evening. Even the station signoff is a distant memory. Now that I am an adult, I feel a bit let down. We always go to sleep instead.
