Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show’ On Peacock

With everything that was going on in the country in 1968 — protests over the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement still raging, authority challenged at every turn — Johnny Carson felt that it wasn’t his place to comment it from behind his desk at The Tonight Show, which he had been hosting from New York since 1962. So he decided to do something revolutionary at the time: give over his seat to a guest host for a week. His choice was Harry Belafonte, one of the country’s most famous singers, actors and activists. The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show is a new documentary that examines just how revolutionary that week was.

THE SIT-IN: HARRY BELAFONTE HOSTS THE TONIGHT SHOW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The five shows Belafonte hosted in February of that year were documented in a Joan Walsh-penned article in The Nation; she’s one of the executive producers of The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show. Directed by Yorbua Richen, it uses audio recordings, the small amount of video footage of the week, plus a number of interviews — including a now 93 year-old Belafonte himself — to piece together a remarkable week of pop culture history that had largely been lost to the mists of time.

Richen positions the week, where Belafonte insisted that his guests be a mix of artists and activists, most of whom were people of color, as part of the larger picture of how the country was torn apart in 1968. Both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were guests, shortly before each were assassinated. He had entertainers like Nipsey Russell, Aretha Franklin, Lena Horne and Sidney Pottier. He also had white actors and singers like Petula Clark and Paul Newman, the latter of which sat right next to MLK. Political discussions, the likes of which Carson had rarely engaged in to that point, got detailed and deep.

As the year progresses, and we hear about MLK’s existential fears and his desire to expand his efforts past civil rights, RFK jumping into the presidential race after Belafonte and others showed him the plight of the country’s poor, and how the assassinations of both men started the country down the road that has created the divisions we’re suffering through now.

Richen talks to a number of people who either experienced the week as a viewer, like Whoopi Goldberg, Bobby Rivers or The War For Late Night author Bill Carter, Belafonte’s daughter Gina, as well as people who weren’t alive when the show aired but have been influenced by the time period and Belafonte, such as Questlove and Robin Thede.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: In a lot of ways, this reminds us of Ali & Cavett: The Tale Of The Tapes, where the social ruptures that ultimately changed the country are told through the lens of what happened on a particular talk show. In that movie, it was Muhammad Ali’s many appearances on The Dick Cavett Show. Here it’s Harry Belafonte’s week hosting The Tonight Show. In both cases, a wider audience (read: white people) got a bigger picture of just what the Black experience in the US is like, which forwarded the cause.

Performance Worth Watching: The ninetysomething Bellafonte not only has great memories of that week, but of the entire civil rights movement, including the first conversation he had with MLK back in the days when the young reverend was leading the protests in Montgomery. He’s sharp as a tack and just as angry about how things haven’t changed all that much since he was a teenager.

Memorable Dialogue: When Belafonte wanted MLK to be booked on the show, an NBC exec asked him if the reverend was going to talk about civil rights on the show. “It’s a silly question. We’ve got him here. What would you like him to do, sing a song?”

Our Take: There’s a feeling in the first 15 or so minutes of The Sit-In that we were going to get yet another superficial lesson on the “crazy year” of 1968. Richen spends a long time not only setting up the mood of the country at the time, but it also talked about Johnny Carson, the late-night landscape of the time and why he just didn’t feel it was his place to talk politics. Maybe it’s my age, but the overview of the year is something we’ve seen a million times, and it feels like it just hits the highlights everyone knows.

But then the film starts to talk about Belafonte’s one week guest hosting stint, the guests he brought on, and the implications the shows had on its mostly white, mostly Midwestern audience. Because audio and video footage of the week is sparse — NBC, like most networks at the time, taped over talk shows, game shows and news shows to conserve money and space, thinking they had only ephemeral value — Richen has to break up discussion of the week and parse it out depending on the topic being discussed.

We appreciated that method because it ties the one week of late-night talk shows into the bigger picture of the year, and points out just how important Bellafonte’s hosting gig was. We didn’t get a ton of information on why exactly the week has been lost to time — it could have been the lack of footage, but it feels that it got swept into the pop culture ether, even by people who were around when the show aired.

That’s not to say that Richen doesn’t hop all over the place. We go from the two big assassinations to Aretha to folk music to today’s politically charged talk shows and our divided nation. But when he sits with one topic and one interview and stays with it awhile, the results are fascinating to watch.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show recalls a remarkable week in pop culture that needs to be remembered and documented, especially because Bellafonte, as hardy as he is, isn’t going to be around much longer. And the messages of a half-century ago definitely resonate today.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream The Sit-In: Harry Belafonte Hosts The Tonight Show On Peacock