DOCUMENTARY PREMIERE: For an entire week in February 1968, Johnny Carson turned over the reins of his NBC
Tonight Show, the dominant late-night program in the country, to entertainer and civil-rights activist Harry Belafonte. Carson knew exactly what he was doing, and probably had a better idea of what Belafonte would do as guest host than most of the millions of viewers who tuned in. At a time when people of color still were relative rarities on TV, and examinations of civil rights issues and bigotry were the purview of TV news rather than entertainment, Belafonte loaded his guest couch each night with activists, liberals, and lots and lots of Black entertainers. Paul Newman, one of the guests, was part of the white minority, as were The Smothers Brothers and Bobby Kennedy. But all of them brought their politics as well as their passion, as did Sidney Poitier, Lena Horne, Bill Cosby, and Martin Luther King, Jr, just to name a few. Not long afterward, both Kennedy and King would be dead – killed by assassin’s bullets. This documentary tells the story of that week, and what happened to those shows in the decades since. For my full review on NPR’s
Fresh Air with Terry Gross, visit the Fresh Air website. And for a full review here at TVWW,
see David Hinckley's All Along the Watchtower.