October 1, 1962 - June 6, 1986
NBC, CBS & Syndicated Talk Show
Host:
Merv Griffin
Announcer:
Arthur Treacher
Musical Director:
Mort Lindsey
Merv Griffin had had a highly successful syndicated talk
show for several years when CBS chose him to wage war
on a network scale with Johnny Carson's Tonight Show in
1969. His arrival meant that there were competing late-
night talk shows on all three network, Joey Bishop having
started one on ABC in the summer of 1967. A cherubic
folksy individual, Merv was a former band singer and
veteran of several network daytime talk and game shows,
in addition to his syndicated show. His ingratiating manner
and aversion to virtually anything that might be considered
radical, offensive, or controversial made his show rather
bland. It did force Joey Bishop off the air, to be replaced by
the dry, intellectual wit of Dick Cavett, but it could never
make a dent in Carson's late-night audience. As CBS' first
regular late-night entry since Chronoscope in the mid-1950s,
The Merv Griffin Show was never as big an audience-grabber
as CBS had hoped and was canceled 2 1/2 years after its debut.
Merv's first talk show had been a 55-minute daytime series on
NBC from October 1962 to March 1963. Two years later he
began the syndicated 90-minute talk show that attracted CBS.
His last daily syndicated Merv Griffin Show ran from the
summer of 1972 until September of 1986 and, along with
a number of successful game shows he had created
over the years, made Merv Griffin a very wealthy man.
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Merv Griffin
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