johnny carson wasn t just the host of the tonight show. johnny carson was the man that america said good night to for 30 years. and on my watch, johnny decided that 30 years was a great time to take a bow and say thank you and good night. 30 years is enough. it s a good time to get out while you re still on top of your game plan. johnny carson retiring in the early 90s was the great moment where a huge chunk of the ice shelf breaks off. something that has been there for centuries, for thousands of years, suddenly is no longer there. a tremendous part of history. and that s lovely to have made your mark on an era like that. johnny had told no one what he had planned to do, and we weren t prepared. and that set off a game of musical chairs for who would get the throne, and there only was
room, and he breaks the door in two with his fist. and i m choking up talking about it right now, because that s how great a moment of tv that it is. 20 years from now, the best tv dramas, what do they look like? i don t know. i don t know whether will they be bolder than what we see today? oh, assuredly, assuredly they will be. the 90s gave us several shows that didn t really explode in the ratings but were very influential to other people making television. homicide is one of them. shell me with questions all night i m living in a danger zone homicide: life on the street was really innovative in terms of its style. it used music in ways that advanced the narrative, and it also used feature film directors that brought a look and style to the show that really stood out on television. tears coming out of your eyes. ain t no tears coming from my eyes. his eyes are brimming with tears. they had so many african
about it. the x files changed way people watched television. you could sense these successful creators try to see how they could do things different than they had done five or ten years ago. sometimes that led to really challenging network television that was cool and fun to watch and sometimes it just seemed to fall off the edge a little bit. at the time steven bochko was a very successful producer of our dramas and wanted to try something brand new. this is the police, we have a warrant for your arrest! and so his idea was to combine a gritty cop show with a broadway musical. i saw one in which a bunch of gang bangers were in jail and they began to sing life in the hood ain t no pizza pie,
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gonna be long that you won t have to leave your living room. no more schools, no more bodegas, no more cinemas. experimentation set the stage for a lot of what came later. it s kind of hard to pin down what exactly the x files is. on the surface, it s a show about investigating pair nra no activities. unidentified flying objects. i think that fits the description pretty well. tell me i m crazy. mulder, you re crazy. that tension of believer versus skeptic is one of the engines of the show and you re always seeing it from a specific point of view. they re equals, yeah, absolutely. they re equals and in a way they ve kind of switched gender stereotypes. the character i play, mulder, is the intuitive one.