It’s no secret that The Chevy Chase Show wasn’t exactly a huge hit.
Back in 1993, the National Lampoon’s Vacation star launched his very own late night talk show on Fox, competing against The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, The Late Show with David Letterman and staring at a blank wall for 60 joyless minutes each night.
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As The New York Times reported at the time, the show “flopped quickly” and was canceled after only six weeks on the air. Why did the show fail? Well, it probably didn’t help that the premiere episode kicked off with Chevy talking to his own hand and then making it the makeshift puppet projectile vomit in the direction of the camera.
Also, Chase never really seemed to fit the late night host mold. Even the head of Fox at the time was quoted as saying that his shows were “almost embarrassing” to watch because he seemed so darn uncomfortable. Particularly cringey were the interview segments. While Chase could manage to carry a conversation with his old pals like Martin Short and Dan Aykroyd, he struggled when it came time to, say, pretend to give a crap about the life of Beverly Hills 90210 star Jason Priestley.
Well, it turns out that the only person who disliked these segments more than the audience was Chevy Chase himself.
LateNighter’s podcast Inside Late Night with Mark Malkoff recently spoke with “veteran” TV associate director Nikki Nash, who recently penned the memoir Collateral Stardust: Chasing Warren Beatty and Other Foolish Things. In addition to working for Johnny Carson and Conan O’Brien, she was also part of the Chevy Chase Show team, and attempted to explain what exactly went wrong.
“Chevy, he was terrific to me, we were friendly,” Nash revealed. “From Saturday Night Live and everything, I think people were so in love with him that he thought they could just run a five minute funny bit of him doing something on the street by himself. And then you’ve got another forty minutes to fill, so we had to start getting guests, because we didn’t record a lot of bits.”
“Maybe a week in, the stage manager told me this, he goes, ‘I think we’re in trouble,’” Nash recalled. “Because (Chase) had a talk segment which was awkward, he gets off stage and he says to Josh, ‘I hate that part where I have to talk to people.’”
If only there had been some sort of warning that hosting a talk show would require actually talking to people.
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