Yes. In this week's New York Observer, Sajak discusses why his late night show failed:
"We had a couple of things going on at the time," Mr. Sajak said. "No. 1, the conventional wisdom was that Johnny Carson was going to be leaving after that season. Our thought was, ‘We will do The Tonight Show.’ Essentially, that was what we were doing—Johnny will leave, Pat is already there, the format is there, the audience will just move over, turn the dial a couple of notches and there we are. Johnny screwed up and didn’t leave for a couple of years—so I’m still upset about that."
Mr. Sajak laughed. "The other thing that happened was that Arsenio Hall came on the air," he said. "The conventional wisdom then was that younger people didn’t watch late-night—but suddenly it was a very hip kind of thing and introducing a different audience. So we were kind of stuck in the middle. We were Johnny Carson Lite, and why do you want that if you’ve got Johnny Carson, and I was a 42-year-old white guy — I wasn’t going to be doing Arsenio Hall stuff. So I don’t think we ever found our footing."
Good read.
No comments:
Post a Comment