(Deadline) — Steve Allen, the co-creator and first host of The Tonight Show, largely was responsible for late-night television as we know it.
Remember Johnny Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent? Well, take a look at Allen’s The Question Man.
“Steve Allen was the generator of a lot of ideas that were ahead of its time,” says Billy Crystal in CNN’s documentary series The Story of Late Night.
The six-part series is a historical deep dive into the origins of the genre that still resonates today as well as a love letter to the medium. It has been overseen by Bill Carter, a man who knows a thing or two about late-night, as the former New York Times media correspondent and author of The War for Late Night and The Late Shift.
Carter is currently a CNN contributor and his involvement helped Cream Productions, the Toronto-based production company behind CNN’s History of Sitcom and Netflix’s Age of Samurai: Battle for Japan.
John Ealer, who has worked on series including The Men Who Built America and The Making Of The Mob, signed on as showrunner and director.