Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
Later (talk show)
Later is an American nightly half-hour-long late-night talk show that ran on NBC from August 22, 1988 until January 18, 2001.
It typically aired for a half-hour four nights a week at 1:30 a.m. following Late Night with David Letterman from 1988 to 1993, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1993 to 2001. It was hosted by Bob Costas from 1988 to 1994, Greg Kinnear from 1994 to 1996, various guest hosts from 1996 to 2000, and finally Cynthia Garrett (the first African-American woman to host a network late-night show) from 2000 until 2001. Later was succeeded by Last Call with Carson Daly in 2002.
During Bob Costas's tenure as host, the show won the 1993 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Series. It was nominated in the same category in 1992, and in the Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Title Sequences category (currently called the Main Title Design category) in 1989.
To be a good guest on Later, you had to have a body of work. And I pat myself on the back here, but it also goes to the producers and researchers: show business people and athletes stay up at odd hours and they watched the show in disproportionate numbers so a lot of people who didn't do TV back then—and there was still a lot of people who didn't do a lot of TV then—did Later. Paul McCartney did and he hadn't done any US television in 10 years, Robert Duvall who hates interviews did a three-parter, Paul Simon did, as did Carole King who hardly ever does any television and is very shy, Elie Wiesel did, Martin Scorsese did Later and then showed it to his film class at NYU...
Even the athletes we had—Hank Aaron, Kareem, Jim Brown, John Wooden, Mickey Mantle—were people with significant life stories, we didn't go after the hot athletes of the moment...
Of course, there were times when on Monday you'd have a show for the time capsule and then on Tuesday, just because you had to have a show, you had someone who was in a sitcom or had a movie coming out that week. We did well over 600 shows, and I wouldn't want the bottom 100 of them to be re-released, but I think most of them held up pretty well.
In 1988, NBC decided to again start producing original programming in the 1:30 a.m. Monday through Thursday slot following an almost five-year period—ever since the late fall 1983 cancellation of NBC News Overnight—during which the time slot had been vacant and local affiliates either signed off for the night or programmed the airtime themselves. NBC sportscaster Bob Costas was announced in late February 1988 as the host of a new program set to debut some six months later in August of that year.
By the time he was hired for NBC's new late-night talk show, 36-year-old Costas had been with NBC Sports for almost a decade, most prominently as the studio host of the NFL Live! pre-game show as part of the network's NFL package. He had furthermore been handling play-by-play announcing for the network's baseball telecasts (alongside color commentator Tony Kubek), and occasionally on their NCAA basketball telecasts as well. Only a month after being announced as the host of the upcoming late-night show, he was also appointed to host NBC's late night coverage from the upcoming 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. Outside of NBC, since November 1986, he had been hosting Costas Coast to Coast, a two-hour, nationally-syndicated Sunday night interview show, reportedly carried weekly by over 150 radio stations, where he got to branch out into longer-form interviews with various athletes. Additionally, since 1983, he had been making regular appearances on NBC's Late Night with David Letterman as part of the show's scripted comedy pieces—mostly as a straight man sportscaster providing live commentary of absurd 'events' thought up by Letterman's writing staff, such as elevator or fire extinguisher races in the RCA Building and search for the Late Night baby. According to Costas, it was in fact Letterman—an admirer of his sports interviews—who had something to do with Costas getting what turned out to be the Later job by suggesting that the sportscaster could do a late night talk show to former NBC executive Dick Ebersol (now heading his own production company No Sleep Productions) who, despite at the moment not formally being a part of NBC's management structure, still had influence within the network owing to many personal and professional contacts including a close friendship with the president of NBC's entertainment division Brandon Tartikoff. Apparently, Letterman—an avid listener of Costas's Sunday night radio show—particularly liked Costas's interview with retired NFL quarterback Bart Starr and told Ebersol that "anyone who can make Bart Starr interesting for two hours deserves to have his own [television] show".
Created and produced by Ebersol, he initially envisioned Later as a nightly reflection on current events in sports and pop culture. However, upon realizing Costas's unwillingness to move to New York City from his family's residence in St. Louis, Ebersol turned it into a stripped-down one-on-one interview show thus eliminating its dependence on current events. Consequently, Later ended up representing something of a break from the typical U.S. late night TV talk show format of the era; featuring Costas and a single guest having an intense conversation for the entire half-hour—without a house band, announcer, opening monologue, studio audience or guest musical performances, close to what Tom Snyder had done on Tomorrow in a similar time slot during the 1970s and would again do on CBS' The Late Late Show in the mid-1990s. Later was taped in New York City at the GE Building's famed Studio 8H, and occasionally in Los Angeles. Costas interviewed a single guest for 45 minutes to an hour in real time before turning the material over to editors, who condensed it down to 22 minutes plus commercials. On several occasions, an interview with a particularly noteworthy guest (examples include Paul McCartney, David Crosby, Bob Seger, Don Rickles, Jerry Lewis, David Letterman, Garry Shandling, Siskel & Ebert, Mel Brooks, Roger Corman, Robert Duvall and Martin Scorsese) was shown over multiple nights. These in-depth discussions won Costas much praise for his interviewing skills. Costas resided in St. Louis throughout his run on Later, flying to New York City once per week to shoot a week's worth of shows, recording all four in a single day. (Later did not air on Fridays as the hour-long music video program Friday Night Videos occupied the time slot following Late Night.)
Debuting on August 7, 1988, guests during the show's first week of episodes were Linda Ellerbee, Gary Coleman and Billy Crystal. An early, generally positive review in Chicago Tribune, though not sure about the need for yet another [nationally broadcast] talk-show, still complimented Costas for coming across as "incontestably genial and dedicatedly sincere" and being "a deft interviewer and a good listener, who knows when to keep quiet, and whose ego doesn't splatter all over the set like Donahue's, Winfrey's, Rivera's, and Downey's". Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg—though heaping praise on Costas as one of "the best, smartest and wittiest sportscasters in the business", being "a talk show host in a sportscaster's body", and "an ideal candidate to succeed in any area of broadcasting"—felt that, on Later, Costas needed time to improve due to a poor choice of "uninspired" guests. Only weeks into its run, Later was preempted for NBC's telecast of the 1988 Summer Olympics, with Costas hosting the network's Olympic late-night coverage that aired live on the U.S. West Coast from 9:30 to 11:30 p.m. Pacific Time.
Hub AI
Later (talk show) AI simulator
(@Later (talk show)_simulator)
Later (talk show)
Later is an American nightly half-hour-long late-night talk show that ran on NBC from August 22, 1988 until January 18, 2001.
It typically aired for a half-hour four nights a week at 1:30 a.m. following Late Night with David Letterman from 1988 to 1993, and Late Night with Conan O'Brien from 1993 to 2001. It was hosted by Bob Costas from 1988 to 1994, Greg Kinnear from 1994 to 1996, various guest hosts from 1996 to 2000, and finally Cynthia Garrett (the first African-American woman to host a network late-night show) from 2000 until 2001. Later was succeeded by Last Call with Carson Daly in 2002.
During Bob Costas's tenure as host, the show won the 1993 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Informational Series. It was nominated in the same category in 1992, and in the Outstanding Achievement in Graphic Design and Title Sequences category (currently called the Main Title Design category) in 1989.
To be a good guest on Later, you had to have a body of work. And I pat myself on the back here, but it also goes to the producers and researchers: show business people and athletes stay up at odd hours and they watched the show in disproportionate numbers so a lot of people who didn't do TV back then—and there was still a lot of people who didn't do a lot of TV then—did Later. Paul McCartney did and he hadn't done any US television in 10 years, Robert Duvall who hates interviews did a three-parter, Paul Simon did, as did Carole King who hardly ever does any television and is very shy, Elie Wiesel did, Martin Scorsese did Later and then showed it to his film class at NYU...
Even the athletes we had—Hank Aaron, Kareem, Jim Brown, John Wooden, Mickey Mantle—were people with significant life stories, we didn't go after the hot athletes of the moment...
Of course, there were times when on Monday you'd have a show for the time capsule and then on Tuesday, just because you had to have a show, you had someone who was in a sitcom or had a movie coming out that week. We did well over 600 shows, and I wouldn't want the bottom 100 of them to be re-released, but I think most of them held up pretty well.
In 1988, NBC decided to again start producing original programming in the 1:30 a.m. Monday through Thursday slot following an almost five-year period—ever since the late fall 1983 cancellation of NBC News Overnight—during which the time slot had been vacant and local affiliates either signed off for the night or programmed the airtime themselves. NBC sportscaster Bob Costas was announced in late February 1988 as the host of a new program set to debut some six months later in August of that year.
By the time he was hired for NBC's new late-night talk show, 36-year-old Costas had been with NBC Sports for almost a decade, most prominently as the studio host of the NFL Live! pre-game show as part of the network's NFL package. He had furthermore been handling play-by-play announcing for the network's baseball telecasts (alongside color commentator Tony Kubek), and occasionally on their NCAA basketball telecasts as well. Only a month after being announced as the host of the upcoming late-night show, he was also appointed to host NBC's late night coverage from the upcoming 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea. Outside of NBC, since November 1986, he had been hosting Costas Coast to Coast, a two-hour, nationally-syndicated Sunday night interview show, reportedly carried weekly by over 150 radio stations, where he got to branch out into longer-form interviews with various athletes. Additionally, since 1983, he had been making regular appearances on NBC's Late Night with David Letterman as part of the show's scripted comedy pieces—mostly as a straight man sportscaster providing live commentary of absurd 'events' thought up by Letterman's writing staff, such as elevator or fire extinguisher races in the RCA Building and search for the Late Night baby. According to Costas, it was in fact Letterman—an admirer of his sports interviews—who had something to do with Costas getting what turned out to be the Later job by suggesting that the sportscaster could do a late night talk show to former NBC executive Dick Ebersol (now heading his own production company No Sleep Productions) who, despite at the moment not formally being a part of NBC's management structure, still had influence within the network owing to many personal and professional contacts including a close friendship with the president of NBC's entertainment division Brandon Tartikoff. Apparently, Letterman—an avid listener of Costas's Sunday night radio show—particularly liked Costas's interview with retired NFL quarterback Bart Starr and told Ebersol that "anyone who can make Bart Starr interesting for two hours deserves to have his own [television] show".
Created and produced by Ebersol, he initially envisioned Later as a nightly reflection on current events in sports and pop culture. However, upon realizing Costas's unwillingness to move to New York City from his family's residence in St. Louis, Ebersol turned it into a stripped-down one-on-one interview show thus eliminating its dependence on current events. Consequently, Later ended up representing something of a break from the typical U.S. late night TV talk show format of the era; featuring Costas and a single guest having an intense conversation for the entire half-hour—without a house band, announcer, opening monologue, studio audience or guest musical performances, close to what Tom Snyder had done on Tomorrow in a similar time slot during the 1970s and would again do on CBS' The Late Late Show in the mid-1990s. Later was taped in New York City at the GE Building's famed Studio 8H, and occasionally in Los Angeles. Costas interviewed a single guest for 45 minutes to an hour in real time before turning the material over to editors, who condensed it down to 22 minutes plus commercials. On several occasions, an interview with a particularly noteworthy guest (examples include Paul McCartney, David Crosby, Bob Seger, Don Rickles, Jerry Lewis, David Letterman, Garry Shandling, Siskel & Ebert, Mel Brooks, Roger Corman, Robert Duvall and Martin Scorsese) was shown over multiple nights. These in-depth discussions won Costas much praise for his interviewing skills. Costas resided in St. Louis throughout his run on Later, flying to New York City once per week to shoot a week's worth of shows, recording all four in a single day. (Later did not air on Fridays as the hour-long music video program Friday Night Videos occupied the time slot following Late Night.)
Debuting on August 7, 1988, guests during the show's first week of episodes were Linda Ellerbee, Gary Coleman and Billy Crystal. An early, generally positive review in Chicago Tribune, though not sure about the need for yet another [nationally broadcast] talk-show, still complimented Costas for coming across as "incontestably genial and dedicatedly sincere" and being "a deft interviewer and a good listener, who knows when to keep quiet, and whose ego doesn't splatter all over the set like Donahue's, Winfrey's, Rivera's, and Downey's". Los Angeles Times television critic Howard Rosenberg—though heaping praise on Costas as one of "the best, smartest and wittiest sportscasters in the business", being "a talk show host in a sportscaster's body", and "an ideal candidate to succeed in any area of broadcasting"—felt that, on Later, Costas needed time to improve due to a poor choice of "uninspired" guests. Only weeks into its run, Later was preempted for NBC's telecast of the 1988 Summer Olympics, with Costas hosting the network's Olympic late-night coverage that aired live on the U.S. West Coast from 9:30 to 11:30 p.m. Pacific Time.