Tom Snyder: Of “Tomorrow” and the Late “Late, Late” Show

A sad passing occurred the other day without much hullabaloo or fanfare: April 27, 2023 was the end of The Late Late Show after a run of 28 years. Today happens to be the birthday of the man who launched that program, a somewhat forgotten late night pioneer whose influence deserves to be better acknowledged, Tom Snyder (1936-2007).

I am just the right age to have learned about Snyder in real time but second hand. Dan Aykroyd did a killer impression of Snyder’s rapid, seemingly glib speech patterns on Saturday Night Live in the late ’70s. I was old enough to watch SNL, which came on the air at 11:30pm (in retrospect, no I wasn’t, kids shouldn’t stay up that late), but in any case I was not old enough to stay up for Snyder’s show at the time, Tomorrow, which came on at the ungodly hour of 1am, following The Tonight Show. Hence the clever name. For a while NBC had the morning show Today, as well as The Tonight Show and Tomorrow. What about the afternoon, you wonder? Well that was pretty much covered by syndicated talk shows of the Merv/Mike Douglas/Dinah/Phil Donahue variety.

Tomorrow launched in 1973, and it was very smart programming, for it filled a void, not just in its time slot but in its function. Television was waxing lightweight. In the ’60s, Carson had done serious interviews from time to time on Tonight, but it wasn’t really his metier and such bookings became became rarer and rarer. On Tomorrow, Snyder would interview newsmakers of whatever sort, sometimes world leaders, sometimes show business people. Snyder was a broadcast journalist by trade (he’d come up the usual way through local radio and television at stations all over the country). But he had an outgoing personality and a fashionably shaggy head of hair, so the net effect was not unlike shows hosted by people like David Frost or Dick Cavett who were coming at it from the other side. They sort of met in the middle. Snyder was also a bridge between generations. Like Edward R. Murrow, he chain-smoked throughout the show, and asked hard questions, didn’t mind making his guests squirm. He also pioneered the no-audience, eerily silent studio format that later became associated with Charlie Rose.

Many of Snyder’s interviews were the stuff of history. John Lennon’s last national TV interview was on Tomorrow, as were the first national appearances of David Letterman, U2, and Weird Al Yankovic. The original SNL cast The Not Ready for Prime Time Players made their first appearance on the show, prior to SNL‘s own first episode. Tomorrow’s very first guest had been Sable Starr, “Queen of the Groupie Scene”, and he also interviewedthe Ramones, Johnny Rotten, KISS and other rock artists unlikely to make it to prime time news or talk shows. Snyder was also a pioneer of what came to be known as “trash tv”, booking guests like Charles Manson, Ku Klux Klansmen, nudists, UFO abductees, and the like. For a time, gossip columnist Rona Barrett was his co-host.

Tomorrow ran for almost a decade, before it was replaced with Late Night with David Letterman in early 1982. Snyder was initially offered the time slot AFTER Letterman, but he turned it down…for the time being. Later with BobCostas(1988-2001) eventually came into that slot, with a tone and format not unlike Snyder’s Tomorrow.

Meanwhile, Snyder went back to local TV, with shows of his own in the New York and L.A. markets. At a certain point (1986) he was going to take one of his local talk shows national through syndication, but Oprah Winfrey launched her new programming at the same time, beating him out for time at local stations.

Then in 1995 came the opportunity to host a show that Letterman had often joked about starting: The Late Late Show, to follow Letterman’s Late Show at CBS. Snyder hosted the program in his original Tomorrow no-audience format, throughout his tenure until leaving in 1999. His last guest was Dennis Miller. Snyder was then succeeded by the better remembered Craig Kilbourne (1999-2004), Craig Ferguson (2005-2014), and James Corden (2015-2023), all of whom put their own spin on the show, and all of whom were comedians, presenting the show more like the other late night shows of their time.

The latter format, btw, i.e. the Tonight Show format which these shows all follow, is getting very long in the tooth, it seems to me. I predict that the decision not to continue Late Late after Corden’s departure, portends a gradual dying out of this ossified form. What will replace it? Well it’s not exactly new anymore but I honestly think it’s going to be shows more like Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Interviewers and their subjects can have conversations ANYWHERE. Why does it need to take place in a mid 20th century TV studio? It’s like being in church!

For more on show business history please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous. And stay tuned for my next book Vaudeville in Your Living Room: A Century of Radio and TV Variety, coming November 2023.