In This Section
TV Guide Spotlight
Also on TVGuide.com
|
« Roush Dispatch
Tom Snyder: When Talk Wasn't Cheap
Tom Snyder by Jim Smeal/WireImage.com
I've been thinking a lot about Tom Snyder since his death from leukemia was made public, in part because my mind already had been preoccupied with the '70s, when this unforgettable talk-show icon was in his late-night NBC heyday.
My own late-'70s time warp was prompted by a 30-year high-school reunion over the weekend in which I referenced That '70s Show more than once. (Did we really look like that? Dress like that? Have hair like that? Only our senior class pictures know the truth, and I'm not sharing.) During my high school and college years, Snyder was a blazing, sometimes hair-raisingly pioneering presence in what had been a late-night wasteland following Johnny Carson's legendary Tonight Show.
Snyder's show, which aired from 1973 to 1982, was called Tomorrow, and to me, the title always underscored the fact that everything about it was a bit ahead of its time. The show's level of discourse, its idiosyncratic host with his brash intensity and eclectic range (historic interviews with everyone from John Lennon to Charlie Manson): nothing about Snyder or Tomorrow was ordinary. David Letterman, whose Late Night NBC show supplanted Snyder in 1982 and who resurrected Snyder's network career in the late '90s by giving him the post-Late Show slot on CBS for several years, describes him thusly: "Tom was the very thing that all broadcasters long to be: compelling."
Can't argue with that. His style was so distinctive and arresting that he became even more famous after Dan Aykroyd's indelible Saturday Night Live parody, complete with that explosively braying laugh, an ever-present halo of cigarette smoke and a fidgety restlessness that spoke volumes about Snyder's boundless intellectual curiosity.
He never spoke down to his audience even as his outsized personality often threatened to upstage his guests. Unlike today's late-night kings, from Letterman and Leno and Conan O'Brien to the Comedy Central combo of Stewart and Colbert and (way down the evolutionary scale) the frat-boy antics of Kimmel, Snyder had little regard or patience for irony. He was the real deal. Maybe too much so (especially for his bosses at NBC, who eventually grew weary of his pugnacious temperament).
Anyone seeking this level of conversation today is probably tuning in to Charlie Rose over on PBS — which at its best can be bracing and stimulating (when Charlie lets his guests get a word in edgewise, that is), but is almost never as much fun as when Tom Snyder let it rip on Tomorrow.
|
TVGuide Links:
|
|
|
|
Jul 31, 2007 12:38 PM
|
|
I remember so well those nights when I couldn't sleep and would catch his Late Late show on TV. I didn't know who he was, but he was such an honest interview. Unlike so many of these interview shows today you feel like the host is really listening. So many of them, including most of the big ones, it feels like they are just reading a list of questions with little interest in the answer.
|
|
Jul 31, 2007 1:12 PM
|
When Tom Snyder's show was cancelled by NBC, Tom Shales wrote one of his finest columns - "It Was the Best of Toms". He said that Tom Snyder was the last broadcaster who actually believed that the medium was meant to communicate, and television would be the poorer for it. He couldn't have been more right - discourse on TV has descended to the likes of Bill O'Reilly and Tim Russert shouting down their guests. You're right that Charlie Rose comes the closest when his ego doesn't get in the way.
Tom Snyder, for all his personality quirks, was the last host on television who asked his guest insightful questions, then actually LISTENED TO THE ANSWER. Our local affiliate used to run his show on a one hour tape delay (to show "Love Boat" reruns, for goodness' sake) but I usually stayed up to watch him. He was unique and he will be missed.
|
|
Jul 31, 2007 3:28 PM
|
For me, the most remarkable things about Mr. Snyder were that he was one of the few journalists [and make no mistake, what he did was journalism of the purest sort] who was as sharp at the end of his run as at the beginning, and that he came to be friends with presidents and gadflies - including Harlan Ellison, who doesn't suffer fools, period.
Mr. Snyder could coax information from a rock. Few of his more taciturn interviewees even knew what hit them when they came out of a session with him.
And yes, Charlie Rose is the closest thing we have to a Tom Snyder, now - and it's good that there's someone keeping that kind of conversational interview alive - but you're right, even at his best, Rose doesn't even begin to match Snyder in terms of enthusiasm, curiosity and just plain fun. Nor is he as capable as getting the taciturn to open up.
All the cliches about breaking the mold... never seeing his like again... They all apply to Tom Snyder.
He was literally one of a kind.
|
|
Jul 31, 2007 3:30 PM
|
I was and for that matter still am a big
fan of Tom. The one thing that I most
admire today is that he rarely imposed
his personal viewpoint on his audience.
I did not realize until I read his web
site (after he retired) that he was
unabashedly liberal and as a hide-bound
conservative I think I would have
noticed had he been more of a proponent.
I never did.
I can only conclude that he believed
that his non-partisan, journalistic
approach was the right way to search for
truth.
Truly he was a consummate professional
and he will be missed.
|
|
Jul 31, 2007 5:35 PM
|
I used to time shift his show, back when VCR's were brand new animals in the average household, and I learned how to work the timer. I had probably 50 tapes of interviews from the late 70's and early 80's. There was so rarely a night when he didn't find a way to make the vagaries of the world's nonsense not only MAKE sense to my teenage self, but humorous sense at that. I can't count the number of books I've read because I saw him interview a writer.
Carson was a great entertainer; but Tom Snyder was a great companion to millions of us in the dark of the night.
|
|
Jul 31, 2007 8:44 PM
|
|
What I admired was that he was one of the last people to actually have a conversation on television. Soundly missed in today's shout-fest world.
|
|
Aug 1, 2007 1:32 AM
|
|
I was very sad to hear about Tom Snyder's death. In the 90s, when he had his Late Late Show after Letterman, I was working a second shift and would come home after midnight. I always looked forward to watching Mr. Snyder's show when I got home - he had the ability to take a guest I normally would have zero interest in, and pull an interview out of him or her that left me completely fascinated. He was the kind of broadcaster who becomes a friend, someone you can count on and look forward to seeing every night. He will be missed.
|
|
Aug 3, 2007 8:54 AM
|
|
|
