This book was entertaining and enjoyable to read. I highly recommend it. Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC.

Upon starting this book, I feared that it would be just another story full of timelines and moments already documented in history. I was wrong - the author does a great job of pulling material from his podcast to tell the story of Johnny Carson. He covers the good, bad and ugly noting Carson as “the comedy version of Walter Cronkite.”

Bill Zehme famously labored over "Carson the Magnificent" for decades. But his posthumously completed work was, for the most part, underwhelming and unsatisfying. I found that to be particularly disappointing, since as memories of Johnny Carson continue to fade two decades after his death and more than three decades since he departed from the Tonight Show, it seemed increasingly unlikely that anyone might ever write - or that there would be any market for - a serious biography of him again.

Then along comes this book, a happy and unexpected surprise. I was a regular listener of Malkoff’s recently-concluded Carson Podcast, and while he was not necessarily the most polished host, his insatiable curiosity about Carson and the Carson-era Tonight Show was infectious. Over eight years and hundreds of interviews, he wrung every possible detail about the show and its host out of Carson friends, associates, show staffers and guests, and even the most mundane details could be fascinating.

This could have been a lazy book, a podcast in print form, stringing together portions of interview transcripts to form a kind of oral history. I almost expected that it might be, since the book’s title “Love Johnny Carson” made it sound like it would be a hagiography, while the subtitle “One Obsessive Fan’s Journey…” made it sound like it would be about Malkoff himself. Instead, I found this to be a legitimate, balanced, comprehensive biography that uses the Carson Podcast interviews as source material but not its only material, and succeeds in every way that Zehme’s did not.

The book touches on Carson’s personal life, his marriages, his temperament, but it’s mostly concerned with his professional life. Bookended by a brief look at his upbringing and a summary of his retirement years, the rest of the book takes a chronological look at Carson’s Tonight Show. All of the most memorable on-air moments, guests, sketches and more are referenced - fans of Carnac, or Ed Ames’ tomahawk throw, or the potato chip lady will not be disappointed.

But the book offers much more than a collection of the show’s greatest hits. The behind-the-scenes details of what we didn’t see on camera are what make the book really stand out. Malkoff seamlessly integrates quotes and anecdotes from his podcast into the narrative, and fleshes it all out with details from earlier books, unpublished manuscripts, contemporary news coverage, print and broadcast interviews, even unaired excerpts from interviews conducted for the 2012 American Masters documentary on Carson.

Beginning with an excellent description of his very first Tonight Show, we learn how Carson ultimately found his stride after mixed initial reviews. Looking back today, one might criticize him for being formulaic and eventually seeming out of touch, but it all stemmed from him having a strong sense of what he wanted the show to be. His reluctance to book modern rock acts, for example, was not so much because he was behind the times, but because he found such acts incompatible with his time slot - he felt a responsibility to lull people to sleep with light entertainment, not jar them awake with something loud and aggressive. And he once learned the hard way that booking a popular musical act brought out fans of said musical act, who filled the audience and were not the least bit interested in or entertained by anything he had to say.

This commitment to his vision of what the show should be also explains why some once-favorite guests were never invited back. The show was always more important than any one individual, so if someone disrespected the process by going over their allotted time, acting ungracefully, being discourteous to staff members, or having an act that had simply become stale, they suddenly found themselves no longer welcome, no matter how big a star they might be. And Malkoff digs up the dirt and names names.

At the same time, Malkoff is not shy about calling out Carson for what could only be described as petty grudges - some of his professional relationships could sour over something as small as a perceived slight. As one of his producers was quoted as saying succinctly, “Once he doesn't like someone, he doesn't start liking them later.”

Malkoff’s excellent sources help debunk, or at least offer fuller versions, of some longstanding myths. While there is truth to a Carson appearance launching careers, even the “overnight successes” were not necessarily instantaneous (Freddie Prinze, for example, was not, as often thought, offered a sitcom the day after his debut; rather, months of discussions and negotiations preceded his sitcom debut). Malkoff debunks the image of Carson as a recluse, noting that he had plenty of friendships and hobbies, but was often mobbed, uncomfortable and sometimes even assaulted while appearing in public, so he eventually preferred simply to avoid it. He also defends Carson from the claim that he stole his Carnac bit from Steve Allen, making the case that Carson in his pre-Tonight days debuted an early version of Carnac before Allen ever did.

And while Carson’s Tonight Show was looser than today's more tightly-scripted and -edited late night shows, it wasn't all improvised. Malkoff describes how staff perfected the now-standard process of pre-interviewing guests in order to ensure they came prepared with their most entertaining stories, how some conversations (complete with “ad libs”) were more or less completely planned out, and how “staff would sometimes engineer spontaneity into the show,” planning for the “unplanned” to happen.

That’s not to say that anything was staged - Ed Ames’ errant tomahawk throw was just as errant as it appeared on screen - but certain moments had to be planned out in order to appear effortless. It seems obvious when you think about it in retrospect, but a famous “spontaneous” event like Carson going across the hall during his show to confront Don Rickles during a live taping of his sitcom couldn’t possibly have been done with the technical limitations of the time unless the idea was planned for. It was still spontaneous in that Rickles didn’t know about it, but the idea also didn’t just happen to pop into Carson’s head in the moment, as it appeared to on TV.

Curiously, nothing is said in the book about Carson’s complicated relationship with Bob Hope. Maybe because there’s nothing more to say? But it felt worth exploring at least a little - was Carson just not a big fan of his style, or did he feel threatened by arguably the only NBC star who was bigger than him?

The book does, however, provide the best recounting I’ve read of Carson’s falling-out with Joan Rivers. The shorthand version, and Rivers’ telling of it, always made Carson look kind of petty - Rivers got a new job, failed to sufficiently grovel to Carson and seek his blessing, and he refused to talk to her for the rest of his life. The longer version Malkoff relates mostly blames Rivers for handling the whole situation gracelessly, keeping the secret for months so that she could continue to guest host and appear as a Carson guest herself when she had already committed to another network, telling a dubious story about how she was left off a list of potential Carson successors, and waiting until after Carson had already found out before even trying to tell him, when she knew he had always been supportive of guests who informed him of their plans to launch a competing talk show. And, as Malkoff’s insiders explained, Rivers then made a bad situation worse, acting disloyally and underhandedly by trying to hire away some of Carson’s key staffers.

Zehme’s take on Carson’s retirement years were tinged with sadness and longing - Carson seemed to want to come back on TV to do something, but couldn’t find the right project and instead faded from the public eye altogether. Malkoff’s take acknowledges that Carson never had a big comeback, but argues that he never seemed particularly troubled by it. Instead, he portrays Carson’s retirement years as fulfilling, giving him the space to pursue his own interests, like traveling and sailing.

The only thing about this take that seems rosier than it might actually have been, is that Malkoff doesn’t attempt to explain the status of Carson’s relationship with his fourth wife Alexis - other sources have indicated that they were essentially separated at the time of Carson’s death, though Malkoff mentions without elaboration that she was among those who were at his side when he passed away.

So while the book as a whole is far from whitewashed, it’s also far from a warts-and-all tell-all. But that’s not a bad thing, because there are enough of those. Malkoff does acknowledge touchy topics like Carson’s troubles with alcohol and with relationships. But where Zehme failed to crack the nut of what made Carson tick, Malkoff succeeds here by not really trying to. His book is more about the show than the personality, more about the performer than the person, more about what we saw (and didn’t see) on screen, and about how it all remains fascinating long after Carson left the scene.

Even after listening to the majority of Carson Podcast episodes, I still learned things from this book that I didn’t know, and was engrossed from start to finish. As a podcaster, Malkoff managed to make you share in his enthusiasm and interest in his subject. As an author, he has now succeeded in doing the same.

A series of anecdotes strung together to make a book. Covering Johnny’s career from the start of the show to his retirement and beyond most of the stories are well known to those who have followed Carson’s career. This is for the Carson novice or the Carson completist. It was a fast read and competently written but did not contain any revelations or insights into Carson than those already revealed. But read it though. Keep the memory of one of the greats of all time front and center.