The Arsenio Hall Show is an American syndicated late-night talk show created by and starring comedian Arsenio Hall.
There have been two different incarnations of The Arsenio Hall Show. The original series premiered on January 3, 1989, and ran until May 27, 1994. Nineteen years after the original series ended, Hall returned for a revival. It premiered on September 9, 2013, and was cancelled after one season, with the finale airing on May 21, 2014.
Both series were produced by Hall's production company, Arsenio Hall Communications. The original series was produced and distributed by Paramount Domestic Television and taped at Stage 29 at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles. The second series was shot at Sunset Bronson Studios in Hollywood, and it was produced by Tribune Broadcasting, Octagon Entertainment and Eye Productions. It was distributed by CBS Television Distribution.
First series (1989–94) Background Hall had been a host on The Late Show in 1987, another talk show on Fox, after the dismissal of Joan Rivers. He was given a 13-week run, during which he became unexpectedly popular. During the monologue of his final appearance as host, Hall stated that he agreed to only do 13 weeks because he could only stay that long as he had plans "to do other things". He subsequently began working on the Eddie Murphy vehicle Coming to America. He ultimately signed with Paramount Television before Fox finally decided, after the fact, that it wanted to keep him. Hall had a fairly long connection with Paramount before this, having been the in-house comedian on Paramount's weekly music series Solid Gold for several years and co-hosting its final two years.
Arsenio, debuting on Tuesday, Jan. 3, 1989, with guests Brooke Shields, Leslie Nielsen and Luther Vandross, was one of two late-night shows to premiere that month. The other was The Pat Sajak Show on CBS, hosted by longtime Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak. Unlike Sajak, Hall benefited from prior experience hosting a late-night program, especially when compared with Sajak's lack of emceeing experience outside of his Wheel duties. Hall also had a clear demographic to serve (whereas Sajak was targeting the already-taken demographic that was watching The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson), and his show premiered the week before Sajak's, giving him a head start. While Hall's show became a near-instant hit, Sajak's show was a ratings flop and was canceled after little more than a year.
Recurring features and gags Burton Richardson's long intro of the show's host (in which he held the letter O in "Arsenio" for as long as ten seconds just before Hall came out on stage, and then in the same breath, immediately announced "HALL!") is a staple of the show. In the intro to the final episode, Richardson held his one-breath introduction for exactly twenty seconds, one of the few times he had done so. While being introduced (and as seen on show titles and promos), Arsenio stood with his head down, hands together and legs apart, in the shape of the letter "A".
One of the show's recurrent themes was affixing a humorous label to a section of the studio audience in rows behind/near the band, called the "Dog Pound", based on the Dawg Pound fan section of Cleveland Stadium and later FirstEnergy Stadium of the Cleveland Browns National Football League team. Members of the original band called "the Posse" included John B. Williams, Starr Parodi, Peter Maunu, Terri Lyne Carrington (later replaced by Chuck Morris) who were led by jazz pianist Michael Wolff, jubilantly interacted with Hall, standing up and making a pumping, whirling motion with their raised fists and howling "Woof, woof, woof". The labeling was a staple of Hall's opening monologue and almost always began with the phrase "Those are people who...." In one variation of Hall ridiculing the "Dog Pound", Hall designated the section as "People who are currently in a Witness Protection Program", at which point a camera pans over to that section to reveal a digitally pixelized view of the audience that made it impossible to identify them.
A frequent joke in Hall's opening monologue suggested that he still lives in Cleveland and drives to Los Angeles every day to host the show. While on these alleged long drives, Hall ponders certain thoughts, referring to them as "things that make you go hmmm...." The running gag inspired a 1991 C+C Music Factory song by the same title. "Things That Make You Go Hmmm..." reached No. 1 on the Billboard Dance Club Songs chart and No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Cultural influence, increasing viewership and profits The Arsenio Hall Show, which premiered on 135 stations nationwide, was aimed primarily at, although not limited to, the younger urban audience. Eddie Murphy (a personal friend of Hall's), George Lopez and other performers were often featured, such as semi-regular guests including Andrew Dice Clay and Paula Abdul. The show quickly appealed to young people of all races and began to attract a wide variety of guests not common on other talk shows. It became the show for entertainers to go to in order to reach the "MTV Generation". The show was commonly dubbed a "Night Thing" and reflected a party or nightclub theme.
Hall's friend M.C. Hammer was also a frequent interview and musical guest. Additionally, Hall interviewed "Jason Voorhees", the main character from the popular Friday the 13th series of films around the time of the release of Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Muppets creator Jim Henson also appeared on the show 12 days before his death in May 1990, marking one of Henson's last public appearances. Hall often featured World Wrestling Federation wrestlers, like Hulk Hogan (who first denied using steroids on the program), "Ravishing" Rick Rude (who made a special set of tights with Hall's face on the back) with Bobby Heenan, Randy Savage, Roddy Piper, Bad News Brown, the Big Bossman, and Akeem with Slick and The Ultimate Warrior.
Hall was also well known for his long fingers, which he would often use to point at the audience. Michael Wolff led the house band, which Hall called "Posse".
With the steadily increasing viewership of The Arsenio Hall Show throughout the 1990-91 television season, the show had reportedly begun making about US$1.2 million in profits per week for its syndicator Paramount—adding up to US$62.4 million for the year, more money than the company made from its most popular prime-time TV series at the time, Cheers, and more than most of its movies generated.
Queer Nation incident During a December 14, 1990 taping, four members of Queer Nation, seated in the back row in different sections of the audience, interrupted Hall's opening monologue demanding to know why he never had any gay guests on the show. Hall's initial answer was that since most of the guests were not open about their sexuality, neither Hall nor the producers knew whether they were gay or not.
When the protesters voiced their offense because the show failed to book filmmaker Gus Van Sant (whose My Own Private Idaho was in production at the time) or actor Harvey Fierstein, Hall defended the show by saying that Elton John had been a guest. Increasingly infuriated, Hall added that he booked guests due to his interest in what they were working on at the time, not because of their sexual preference. (Specifically, in the case of Fierstein, saying that if he was doing something that Hall found interesting, he would book him as a guest.) The heated exchange went on for several minutes, and Hall continued to defend himself as both a comedian and a host, pointing out that he also had gay friends, and that a person's sexual preference was really nobody else's business. Fierstein eventually did become a guest on the show months later.
Bill Clinton In June 1992, then-presidential candidate Bill Clinton (who was a fan of the show) was a guest on the show, playing "Heartbreak Hotel" on the saxophone (causing Arsenio to quip, "It's nice to see a Democrat blow something besides the election"). The appearance is often considered an important moment in Clinton's political career, helping build his popularity among minority and young voters. Clinton went on to win the election in November 1992.
Displacement by new network shows, ratings decline and cancellation The program remained popular into 1993, airing on 178 stations throughout America. As the year went on, the ratings declined due in large part to the premiere of three late-night series before the year was out.
At the end of the 1992–93 season one of Hall's strongest bases consisted of CBS affiliates. At the time, and ever since the 1972 cancellation of The Merv Griffin Show, CBS did not offer much in the way of late night programming other than its nightly crime drama rerun block and its overnight newscast CBS News Nightwatch (later replaced by Up to the Minute), and had not offered a late-night variety program since The Pat Sajak Show was cancelled in 1990. Among the reported 44 CBS stations that aired Arsenio at the time included WBBM-TV in Chicago (one of the network's owned-and-operated stations), WUSA in Washington, D.C., WAGA-TV in Atlanta, WJBK-TV in Detroit and WJW-TV in Hall's hometown of Cleveland (the latter three of which were owned at the time by businessman George Gillett via his then-recent acquisition of Storer Communications; all three are now affiliates of Fox after a high-profile affiliation switch). Some of these stations picked up Hall's show to fill the void left by Sajak's cancellation, while many others had chosen to carry Hall's program in lieu of Sajak's. Another prominent group of stations that carried the program were affiliates of the still-young Fox, many of which picked up Arsenio to fill the gaps left when The Late Show, which never was able to find an audience, was finally canceled in 1988. This group, numbering 72 stations total, included WTXF-TV in Philadelphia, a station that Paramount acquired in 1991.
In the summer of 1993, David Letterman, who had spent over 13 years at NBC and the previous 11 as the host of the popular Late Night, which followed The Tonight Show at 12:30, left the network due to his dissatisfaction with being passed over as host of The Tonight Show after the retirement of Johnny Carson in favor of Jay Leno. Letterman signed with CBS to do a late-night program which would compete head-to-head with The Tonight Show, and which would also compete with Hall's program. Unlike the situation that prevailed when he was competing against Sajak, Hall was now up against one of the most popular hosts in late night television. Several CBS stations, including WBBM-TV, dropped Hall's show when Late Show with David Letterman debuted in August or pushed it back further in the night. Most of the rest dropped Hall when Letterman's show became a runaway hit, even surpassing The Tonight Show in the Nielsen ratings. WUSA was one of the exceptions, having rebuffed an edict by CBS for all of its affiliates to clear the Late Show at the normal network time for their respective time zones, while in Milwaukee, Arsenio was paired back-to-back by Fox affiliate WCGV-TV with the Late Show, which was refused clearance by then-CBS affiliate WITI (also co-owned with the aforementioned Storer stations that were becoming part of New World Communications at the time; now a Fox O&O) in favor of syndicated sitcoms. Then-CBS affiliate WBAL-TV in Baltimore also retained the show when The Late Show started, instead being cleared by then-independent WNUV. Arsenio also found itself losing some of its audience to cable, as MTV launched the daily thirty-minute program The Jon Stewart Show, which became popular in its own right.