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Since its debut last January, The Arsenio Hall Show has passed both Pat Sajak and David Letterman in the ratings, to take the No. 2 slot behind Carson's venerable Tonight show. Hall's show ranks No. 1 among the important under-35 audience. "I take the view that the public has elected me as a new late-night talk-show host," he says enthusiastically. "I've worked all my life preparing for it, putting together a platform -- my kind of guests, my kind of music, what I think is funny. I've been warming up in the '80s, but I'm really for the '90s. I'm the talk-show host for the MTV generation."
The TV industry is getting the message. Rather than merely redistribute the existing late-night audience, Hall's show has attracted new viewers. Some urban contemporary radio stations have noticed a drop in their listenership when Hall is on the air. The inevitable TV imitators are starting to appear, notably The Byron Allen Show on CBS, a Saturday-night talk show with another black comic as host. Even fuddy-duddies like Carson and Sajak seem to be feeling the heat. Would rock acts like Simply Red and Stevie B. have been booked in the days before Hall?
Not that Carson is in imminent danger of losing his title as late-night king. After soaring during the summer, Hall's ratings have slacked off a bit this fall. (The kids who constitute his main audience, explain show executives, have gone back to school.) Through it all, Tonight's ratings have remained relatively stable. "This race is not a sprint, it's a marathon," notes Brandon Tartikoff, president of NBC Entertainment. "Whatever burns the brightest, fades the fastest."
Complacency would be a mistake, however: Hall's popularity may signal a geologic shift in late-night TV. The rise and fall of potential rivals to Carson -- from Alan Thicke to Joan Rivers -- has become an industry joke. But Hall is the first to catch on, and he has done it by reaching out to a new group of viewers. It is not Carson's audience, Hall likes to point out, but Carson's audience's children. "The Tonight show is an institution," says Steve Allen, who started it all back in 1954. "But with each tick of the clock, its advantage disappears. The Tonight show audience is dying every day." No need to convince Mel Harris, president of Paramount Television, the company that syndicates The Arsenio Hall Show. "In the 1960s, Johnny Carson started with a young audience that stuck with him for 20 years," he says. "Arsenio's is the new generation."
Hall has a new-generation approach to stardom as well: try to do it all. At 30, he is not only the headliner but also the executive producer of his show. He hires the staff, okays the guests and even wrote the theme music. (He has a substantial share of the show's profits.) He has recorded a comedy-music album, Large and In Charge, scheduled for release later this month. On it he performs in the persona of an alter ego, a fat rapper named Chunky A, whom Hall played as a "guest" on his show last May. He has made a video as Chunky A, now airing on MTV. A movie career, meanwhile, has sprouted almost effortlessly. Last year Hall co-starred with his best pal Eddie Murphy in Coming to America, the No. 2 box-office hit of 1988. Next week he will be back onscreen with Murphy in Harlem Nights.