Straddling the line between news and entertainment and airing immediately following The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, notable guests of Tomorrow throughout its eight-year run included Ken Kesey, Charles Manson, Spiro Agnew, Harlan Ellison, Alfred Hitchcock, Jimmy Hoffa, Sterling Hayden, David Brenner, and James Baldwin.

In fall 1973, NBC's decision to launch a nightly program after the Tonight Show was prompted by the 1970 Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, which banned tobacco advertising on television in the United States, resulting in a loss of revenue for the network.

Schlosser had also had a hand in putting The Midnight Special on NBC eight months prior and had previously spent years as the RCA Corporation-owned television network's vice president for programs on the West Coast.

[5] Some ten hours before the program's premiere, NBC organized an afternoon preview screening for journalists and reporters, showing them a mix of already-recorded Tomorrow segments that ostensibly were to air in initial episodes.

The rest of the first week saw Reverend Ike and Billy James Hargis on Tuesday for a general discussion on religion, cult deprogrammer Ted Patrick on Wednesday, and finally the group marriage episode on Thursday with two different real-life "triads"—one featuring two men and a woman and the other with two women and a man.

Two weeks into Tomorrow's run, the New York Times television and cultural critic John Leonard, writing under the pen name Cyclops, assessed the new late-night program as "not decided whether it wants to be newspaper, full of headlines and opinions, or a collection of old magazine articles," further stating that "it is neither balm nor shock therapy, it neither entertains nor inspires.

[1] As decided on and implemented by its director Tator and host Snyder, the show featured distinct visuals during interviews such that, as the conversation progressed, extreme closeup shots of the speaker's face would be shown.

These included illegitimate children, UFO sightings, suicide, male prostitution, pickup artists, child abuse, race and intelligence, film censorship, bisexuality, witchcraft, Vietnamese orphans fathered by U.S. soldiers, consumerism, lives of single persons, exorcism, police brutality, transsexuals, Bermuda Triangle, gambling, Catholicism in U.S. society, professional team sports, teenage alcoholism, weekly newspapers, trucking, rape, ageing, crime, divorce, cosmetic surgery, etc.

[16][17] It also hosted somewhat unusual and atypical guests for the corporate-owned nationally-televised U.S. network talk-shows such as sixteen-year-old spiritual leader Guru Maharaj Ji, authoritative Tennessee sheriff Buford Pusser, Playgirl editor Marin Milan, actress Sue Lyon who had just married an imprisoned convict, Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in Louisiana David Duke, etc.

Vice-President Spiro Agnew, special prosecutor Leon Jaworski, and U.S. President Richard Nixon's political operatives/advisors Donald Segretti, Charles Colson, and Jeb Stuart Magruder—would end up coming on as guests.

[25] In a topical interview that would end up staying notable beyond its time due to Hoffa's murder/disappearance several months later, the former president of the Teamsters discussed the then current NYPD labor dispute, problems within the garbage worker's union, and the Penn Central situation.

Following the end of The Best of Carson weekend reruns of the Tonight show, Snyder stepped in to do a special Saturday 11:30 p.m. ninety-minute broadcast of Tomorrow with Jerry Lewis as the only guest on October 4, 1975 because a new program meant to premiere that evening was not ready to launch.

Lewis was interviewed for one hour and fifteen minutes, before Snyder brought out the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players" (Gilda Radner, Laraine Newman, Jane Curtin, Dan Aykroyd, Chevy Chase, Garrett Morris, and John Belushi) for the last fifteen minutes of the show so that their boss—show's executive producer Lorne Michaels who did most of the talking—could introduce the debut cast of the network's new sketch series NBC's Saturday Night (the title would not be changed to Saturday Night Live until 1977) to the national audience.

[28] Further lampooned in the sketches were the Tomorrow host's seemingly mismatched jet-black eyebrows and grey hair in addition to his mercurial manner and self-indulgent, digressive way of asking questions as well as his clipped speech pattern.

[29] Being the subject of satire on the highly-rated sketch-variety show greatly raised Snyder's profile; due to SNL having a much larger audience than Tomorrow, many viewers saw the impression before knowing the man's own work.

[31] Possible career paths such as succeeding Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show, going straight to Today, or replacing John Chancellor on NBC Nightly News were regularly bandied about in the U.S. national press.

On April 25–28, 1977, the beginning of sweeps, Tomorrow was in Chicago for a week of shows from Drury Lane Theatre featuring a lineup of Chicago-related personalities as guests, including former Bears quarterback Bobby Douglass, Bears owner George Halas, White Sox sportscaster Harry Caray, White Sox owner Bill Veeck, Sun-Times columnist Irv Kupcinet, actor Forrest Tucker, broadcaster Paul Harvey, comedienne Fran Allison, puppeteer Burr Tillstrom, and author-broadcaster Studs Terkel.

On May 25, 1978, Snyder hosted a three-person panel of young comedians and comedy writers—31-year-old David Letterman and his 29-year-old girlfriend Merrill Markoe, as well as 30-year-old Billy Crystal—each of whom had recently moved to Hollywood in search of a career in show business, appearing on Tomorrow on this occasion to discuss their lives as struggling comics.

The encounter on the show would prove significant for Snyder's own future television career prospects as it marked the beginning of his acquaintance with Letterman that over subsequent two decades evolved into friendship and even business relationship.

[30] With the announcement of the relocation of Tomorrow back to New York, as well as the launch of his new prime time program, Snyder was the subject of a lengthy Washington Post profile by influential television critic Tom Shales with discussion of the seeming dichotomy within the broadcaster's career—being both a newsman and a showman—dominating the piece.

Tomorrow's guests supplied the program with plenty of bizarre moments such as an August 1979 appearance by the 24-year-old Chicago shock-jock Steve Dahl who had gained a measure of national attention in the United States earlier that summer for taking part in the infamous Disco Demolition Night promotion at a White Sox game at Comiskey Park.

[48] Another run-in Snyder had with petulant rock stars on Tomorrow occurred on June 27, 1980 in a cigarette-smoke-filled appearance of Public Image Ltd's John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) and Keith Levene, whose thoroughly uncooperative twelve-minute interview on the show acquired a long-term notoriety.

[55] Snyder resented all three changes, repeating his often stated discomfort with doing "big television", instead preferring the intimate setting that allows real conversation as well as sincere and genuine personal moments to take place.

The first episode in the new time slot aired on September 8, 1980 with Snyder interviewing Rona Barrett as guest and announcing her arrival on the show on October 27, 1980, presenting it as "adding somebody who would be able to report on the many facets of the entertainment industry around the country and all over the world.

[57] Seeing Snyder frustrated with sharing the spotlight with the high-profile entertainment television personality and Barrett unhappy over her marginalized status on the program despite officially being its co-host, NBC responded by hiring a new executive producer, 40-year-old former Nixon presidential campaign staffer Roger Ailes, tasking him with controlling the co-anchors the network believed were being petty and immature.

Introducing the five-year-old interview about to be replayed, Snyder referred to it as "not terrific, not terribly entertaining or enlightening, containing no historical information or anything new, but having little bits of stuff and substance of a man who was part of change, a revolution if you will, in popular music during the 1960s.

"[59] The relationship between the two co-hosts soon turned into an open feud; in late December 1980, Barrett even walked off the show as a result of Snyder refusing to "throw it to her" by not introducing her entertainment segment during a Tomorrow taping.

[62] In keeping with the singular event nature of the broadcast, the day before the interview was set to air, NBC organized a special screening for journalists followed by a press conference where Snyder and Ailes took questions from the thirty gathered reporters.

"[63] Though it brought the show a huge ratings number (22.2 million viewers instead of its customary 6.9),[58] Snyder would eventually publicly voice his reservations about the appearance, expressing in a later interview that it "established absolutely nothing, other than what was already well known—that Manson is a nutcase."

[55] Barrett's decision made major news in the U.S. television entertainment circles, including Johnny Carson mentioning it the same night in his Tonight Show monologue via a joke that "Snyder's already found a replacement for Rona—Charles Manson".