Tom Snyder, who died Sunday at 71, marched a motley parade of personalities through America’s bedrooms in his eight years as host of NBC’s late-night interview show “Tomorrow.”

From newsmakers to bookmakers to Charles Manson, who garnered the show’s highest ratings, Snyder treated all his guests to a gimlet gaze and digressive questions punctuated by high nasal laughs. In the land of coiffed hair and careful neutrality, he was a smoky blast of opinionated air. Many viewers detested him.

“He would have made Mark Twain happy because he was sarcastic and interested in the common person,” a mentalist whom Snyder interviewed many times, the Amazing Kreskin, said in an interview yesterday.

Snyder was recognizable enough to inspire a legendary “Saturday Night Live” impersonation by Dan Aykroyd — when such a thing actually meant something. The veteran TV newsman and Columbia University professor Fred Friendly once credited Snyder’s success to “enormous animal vitality” and added that “he could just count to thirty and the audience would stay with him.”

The show walked a sometimes uncomfortable line between show business and journalism, as Snyder’s eclectic guest lists indicated: Ex-Beatle John Lennon, Marlon Brando, Watergate burglar Jeb Stuart Magruder, and union president Jimmy Hoffa all sat down with Snyder. Porn star-turned-rock singer Wendy O. Williams came on and blew up a television. “There was a lot of talk around NBC at the time about which Johnny he wanted to be, Johnny Carson or John Chancellor,” Chuck Scarborough, who co-anchored the Channel 4 local news with Snyder in the 1970s, said. “Was his show entertainment or news?”

Though perhaps neither fish nor fowl, the formula worked well enough one on one as a lower-key follow-on to Carson’s “Tonight” show, the first time the network had claimed the late-night slot. But the audience fell away in 1981 after NBC programmer Fred Silverman added a band and the Hollywood gossip reporter Rona Barrett to the mix. The show tanked, replaced by David Letterman’s more irreverent and irrelevant show.

“NBC believed that David Letterman was the late-night program of the 1980s,” Snyder told the Washington Post in 1995. “And by the way, if we take a look at the film, if we hold it up to the light, that was a correct perception.”

The prolix Snyder returned to host late-night gab at CBS in the 1990s, after Mr. Letterman moved to that network. But the critical consensus seemed to be that Snyder had lost his mojo.

Snyder grew up in Wisconsin, the son of a peddler, and dropped out of journalism school to work as a news reporter at WSAV-TV in Savannah, Ga. He worked at a number of regional stations and liked to tell the story of being fired either in Savannah or in Kalamazoo, Mich., depending on the telling, after belching on the air and blaming it on a meal at the local Howard Johnson’s, which happened to be owned by the station’s owner.

In1965, Snyder landed as anchorman at the NBC affiliate KYW-TV in Philadelphia, where his newscast ended up leading the ratings. He also hosted a weekly hour-long talk show for the station, and then in 1970 moved to KNBC-TV in Los Angeles, where he again split duties between anchoring and hosting a talk show. Soon, KNBC’s nightly news, a perennial also-ran, sat atop the ratings, too.

Snyder moved to New York in 1973 to host “Tomorrow”; the critic John Leonard, writing for the New York Times under the byline Cyclops, welcomed it with open teeth. After viewing the first show, which featured multiply married “triads,” he wrote, “If a program like ‘Tomorrow’ is not going to rely on hard news or low humor maybe it should exploit paranoia.”

While perhaps inferior to Dick Cavett, Mr. Leonard wrote, Snyder “editorializes with his face — he visibly seethes with opinions — and that is preferable to being permanently dumbfounded, like Merv Griffin, or vaguely resentful, like Johnny Carson, or slightly lobotomized, like David Susskind.” The show created enough buzz to stick around for the better part of a decade. Snyder seemed never less than frank, and even while continuing to anchor WNBC’s “Newscenter 4” he labeled its extended offerings “a con job.” After leaving the anchor’s seat in 1977, he hosted numerous network news specials, often alongside Barbara Walters.

His personal bifurcation — news or entertainment? — continued into the 1980s. When Snyder and Tom Brokaw each left their job, at the end of December in 1981, the Washington Post led the story, “It was the best of Toms, it was the worst of Toms.” The two Toms were headed in opposite trajectories, one from “Today” to the NBC nightly news anchor spot, the other from “Tomorrow” to a series of lesser jobs, including stints as a call-in radio host and at the fledgling financial news network CNBC.

In 2005, he announced that he had been diagnosed with leukemia.

Tom Snyder

Born May 12, 1936, in Milwaukee; died July 29 in San Francisco of complications from leukemia; survived by a daughter, Ann Marie, and a longtime girlfriend.