How does a TV show get canceled 6 minutes into it's live premiere?
In 2003, the first-ever late-night talk show hosted by a 10-year-old boy premiered live for six minutes before it was violently pulled from the air and abruptly canceled. Its host, Donnie Dixon, hasn’t been heard from since.Past My Bedtime: An Oral History of the Fastest Failure in Late Night History is journalist Phillip Jackal’s (David Harbour) audio documentary following his obsessive quest for the truth about what happened that ill-fated night.Can he finally uncover the truth about Donnie Dixon? Or why the government destroyed all evidence of the broadcast? After chasing this story for almost two decades, it’s finally time for Jackal to tell it.
Tropes:
- Abusive Parents:
- The Dixons are abusive in the sense that they're either neglectful or push very weird ideas onto their son. Like placing him in an ad for the U.S. military that presents him as a would-be child soldier.
- Adults Are Useless: Just about every adult presented in the podcast is a dangerous moron who is barely capable of being kept afloat in life.
- Phillip Jackal ruins his life by being fixated on a failed late-night show, which ruins causes a divorce with his wife, and then he proceeds to ruin the life of one of Donnie's professors by accidentally goading him into screaming "I hate juice!"
- Government Conspiracy:
- It's postulated in the podcast that Past My Bedtime with Donnie Dixon's failure was a massive conspiracy to distract America from its invasion of Iraq. But on a more hilarious level, it's also a conspiracy to support Bush's invasion of Iraq, by marketing Donnie as a boy who wants to grow up to be a soldier.
