The worst episode...

Occasionally, Carson could actually have a good, entertaining interview, but it depended entirely on who he was interviewing. An example on one of the recent Antenna shows was Sam Donaldson. I'm not much of a fan of the guy, but he interviewed well with Carson. It's a real shame just about all of the sixties' shows are gone. I have a hunch that, back then, Carson was a much better interviewer, much closer to, say, Jack Paar.

But as the years went on, those types of interviews became more and more rare and, yeah, Dick Cavett, aka 'The Thinking Man's Carson' was much better in a civil discourse with his guests. Ironically, Cavett was originally a writer on The Tonight Show for Carson and it's very telling how Carson and Cavett maintained a good relationship throughout their respective careers unlike, say, Joan Rivers.

It really would be great to see some of those old Cavett shows, but I doubt many were saved. Cavett didn't have anything like Carson's power, and it's probably a foregone conclusion that, with the exception of a handful of shows, they're all gone. One of my favorites was when Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroiannni got into a heated debate about male-female relationships.

Carson's focus and demeanor really shifted to light, Burt Reynolds-type fluff when he moved the show to LA, and he had to know it. The so-called interviews became nothing more than plugs for whatever the guest was starring in or publishing. Letterman wasn't far off, having once said that if you wanted to appear on his show, you had to have three anecdotes to retell. But Letterman had other, original stuff that he could also use whereas Carson was down to the same, tired bits he'd been using for the past decade (or more).

Cavett wasn't like that; there weren't any dumb comedy bits (that I can recall) and he could keep the interview interesting without resorting to cheap one-liners. I suspect that although Carson's fortunes increased substantially in Burbank, this is when his actual, off-camera, real persona got worse and worse, simply because he knew his show had become total garbage compared to the earlier, New York shows.