During most of its run it was broadcast from Studio 6B (formerly the home of Milton Berle's Texaco Star Theater series) inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York City.

A combo band conducted by Paar's Army buddy pianist José Melis filled commercial breaks and backed musical entertainers.

Other guest hosts included Jonathan Winters, Orson Bean, as well as the show's announcer, Hugh Downs.

Paar's original announcer was actor Franklin Pangborn, but he was fired after only a few weeks for not showing enough "spontaneous enthusiasm".

Only a few minutes of video of Paar's talk host career in color are known to exist today; NBC's policy at the time was to preserve programming on black-and-white kinescopes, but this policy only applied to live or videotaped prime time programming, and as such, the videotapes of most of Paar's Tonight Show appearances were taped over and no longer exist, a policy that continued through the first ten years of Johnny Carson's hosting of the same series.

His guests tended to be literate raconteurs such as Peter Ustinov or intellectuals such as William F. Buckley Jr., as opposed to just actors or other performers selling their current work, while Paar earned a reputation as a superb storyteller.

He surrounded himself with a memorable group of regulars and semi-regulars, including Cliff Arquette as the homespun "Charley Weaver", author-illustrator Alexander King, Tedi Thurman (NBC's sultry "Miss Monitor") and comedy actresses Peggy Cass and Dody Goodman.

In 1959, Paar was criticized for his interview with Cuban leader Fidel Castro; Paar's on-location interview was the last time any American late-night show filmed in Cuba until Conan O'Brien, who himself briefly hosted Tonight, visited the country in 2015 for an episode of his show, Conan.

[4] On December 1, 1959, Paar again made news by asking an apparently inebriated Mickey Rooney to leave the program, remarking "It's a shame, he was such a great talent.

[7] Paar also engaged in a number of public feuds, one of them with CBS luminary Ed Sullivan, and another with Walter Winchell.

The latter feud "effectively ended Winchell's career", beginning a shift in power from print to television.

(a reference to Mansfield's breasts); the writer of the joke was Dick Cavett, who later went on to host his own show on ABC.

The most notorious example of this kind of on-screen behavior was demonstrated on the February 10, 1960, show, when one of his jokes was cut from a broadcast by studio censors.

She asks about the location of the "W.C." The Swiss, thinking she is referring to the "Wayside Chapel", leaves her a note that said (in part) "the W.C. is situated nine miles from the room that you will occupy...

"NBC censors replaced that section of the show with news coverage and failed to inform Paar of their decision.

He expected the host to return to the stage,[8] but the abrupt departure left Downs to finish the broadcast himself.

[11] Urged to return to the show by his friend Jonathan Winters,[8] Paar reappeared on March 7, 1960, strolled on stage, struck a pose, and said, "As I was saying before I was interrupted...".

He then went on to explain his departure with typical frankness: "Leaving the show was a childish and perhaps emotional thing.

The months between Paar and Carson were taken by a series of guest hosts, including Groucho Marx, Jerry Lewis, Jack Carter and Mort Sahl.