RIP Tom Snyder
July 31, 2007 
Former Late Late Show host Tom Snyder died Sunday at the age of 71 from leukemia.
His work on the Late Late Show, which followed David Letterman’s Late Show on CBS for three years and featured just him and a guest, and his prior work on NBC’s Tomorrow Show, following the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson was notable for its hard hitting, hold-nothing-back celebrity interviews cutting through celebrities’ crap.
Just check out this clip where Tom interviews Elton John, Stephen Spielberg, Johnny Rotten, Bono and “The Edge” from U2, Cheech and Chong, Alfred Hitchcock, Charles Manson, and Muhammad Ali:
That’s some crazy stuff that you never see on late night talk shows these days. This Late Late Show interview with David Letterman sums up perfectly the change television was going through at the time and gives some insight into the relationship between the two hosts:
And now some interesting trivia about Tom Snyder’s career:
- Snyder’s Tommorrow Show was replace on NBC with Letterman’s Late Show and his CBS Late Late Show was produced by Letterman
- The Late Late Show actually started as a running joke on the Late Show and actually caught on.
- Tom Snyder filmed the Tomorrow Show in NBC’s studio 6A at Rockefeller Center: the same studio where Late Night with Conan O’Brien is filmed today.
- Snyder co-anchored WABC’s evening newscast with now-CW11 anchor Kaity Tong between 1983-84.
Thanks Tom for the irreverent interviews, the celebration of the novelty of color TV, and exposing and cutting through the fakeness and nonsense coming out of people’s mouths that nowadays most people on television fail to address. I dedicate this colortini to you…
