The Tomorrow Show
American late-night talk show (1973–1982)
The Tomorrow Show (also known as Tomorrow with Tom Snyder or Tomorrow and, after 1980, Tomorrow Coast to Coast) is an American late-night television talk show hosted by Tom Snyder that aired on NBC in first-run form from October 1973 to December 1981, at which point its reruns continued until late January 1982.
Straddling the line between news and entertainment and airing immediately following The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, notable guests of Tomorrow throughout its eight-year run included Ken Kesey, Charles Manson, Spiro Agnew, Harlan Ellison, Alfred Hitchcock, Jimmy Hoffa, Sterling Hayden, David Brenner, and James Baldwin. Unique and often revealing one-on-one exchanges were the program's staple. Since Johnny Carson had mostly abandoned the highbrow, intellectual guests that were common in the early years of his Tonight Show while it originated from New York City (and especially during Jack Paar's hosting run), many of those types of guests—such as social satirist Mort Sahl, actor-activist Marlon Brando, and novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand—eventually ended up on Tomorrow.
Musicians that were featured on the program included The Clash, Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, Kiss, John Lennon (in his last televised interview), Paul McCartney, Public Image Ltd, the Ramones, U2 (in their first American television appearance), Anne Murray, "Weird Al" Yankovic (in his first televised appearance), and Wendy O. Williams and the Plasmatics. Los Angeles news anchor Kelly Lange, a colleague of Snyder, was the regular substitute guest host.
Frank Barton was the show's original announcer when it was based in Burbank; Bill Wendell took over announcing duties when the program moved to New York.
History and format overview
In fall 1973, NBC's decision to launch a nightly program after the Tonight Show was prompted by the 1970 Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned tobacco advertising on television in the United States, resulting in a loss of revenue for the network. The thinking was that extending the broadcast day by one hour could help recover some of that income. NBC had already begun programming the post-Tonight Show time slot on early Saturdays (late Fridays) with The Midnight Special, which began regular airings (initially brokered) eight months before Tomorrow launched; the success of The Midnight Special was a likely factor in expanding programming in the time slot to five days a week.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7820241. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1980, 1973, 1981 and 1982.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Tomorrow Show” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.