is Late Night Dead - 2. Late Show with David Letterman - Establishment Letterman and the show he didn't get

0:03 Hi there, I'm Johnny Mac, and. In January of 1993, David Letterman finally got the phone call he had been waiting for since he was a weatherman in Indianapolis. NBC called. They were offering him The Tonight Show. Dave had watched Johnny Carson at that desk as a kid, and for 11 years, Dave had followed Johnny at 1230, certain that when Johnny Carson left The Tonight Show, the desk would be his. Now the network was telling David Letterman it could be, and Dave said no.

0:43 You forget the timeline here. You forget that this phone call even happened. There was a catch in the offer. Jay Leno had already been hosting the Tonight Show. This wasn't straight from Johnny to Dave. Jay already had the chair. Jay had been hosting The Tonight Show for eight months and NBC wasn't proposing to hand it over right away. Dave would have to wait until May of 1994. Now, wouldn't that have been just an interesting alternate history now that we know what happened with Conan and Jay Leno? What if Jay had the show taken away from him? That would have been all kinds of interesting. We will get to that part of the story eventually. Would Dave wait until May of 1994? No, because CBS was offering him $ 14 million a year and his own show at 1130 and a start date that summer. So Dave did what he often did when he wasn't sure about something.

1:28 He called Johnny Corson. According to Bill Carter's book, The Late Shift, Johnny Corson told Dave if he were in Dave's position, he'd probably leave. That tracks because Corson was often talking about leaving The Tonight Show. Never did, but often talked about it. Dave's producer, Peter LaSalle, who had also been Johnny Corson's producer, was blunter and called The Tonight Show, quote, damaged goods. If Dave took it now, he'd be the guy who pushed Jay Leno out of a job. and the press would kill him for it, and I think we see what happened with Jay Leno's legacy. That take is correct. Welcome to Is Late Night Dead? Last week, I told you about 1230 Dave, the anti-talk show, the show that got great because Johnny Carson handed it a list of things it wasn't allowed to do. This week is the other Dave, the 1131, and I've got a confession about 1130 Dave. I'll get to it in a few minutes, but it's a big part of why I think this story works. First, how Dave lost the show.

2:21 We left off. It was May of 1991. Johnny Carson announced he was leaving in a year, and everybody at 1230 assumed what would happen next. What Dave didn't know is that it was already over. Jay Leno's manager, Helen Kushnick, had signed a deal with NBC a week before Carson even made the announcement, and that deal guaranteed Jay Leno the Tonight Show. NBC made it public that June. One NBC executive explained the decision by saying it wasn't that hard because Leno was more mainstream and 1230 Letterman had more of a niche program, a cult program. Amen, brother. So the reason Dave didn't get The Tonight Show was the same reason people like me loved him. The show was weird, the audience was young, and the guy in the sneakers made the affiliates nervous. Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show on May 25th, 1992. I have it on VHS. If you'd like to watch it, you can go up to my upstairs closet library with the DVDs and a couple of VHS tapes. I've got Johnny's last show and Jay's first. As we will hear over and over in this series, the first year of a late night show is sometimes rocky. And Jay Leno's first year was rocky enough that NBC started wondering, hey, did we pick the wrong guy? We have a theme here. We will absolutely revisit that as a theme. That's how you get to January of 1993 in that phone call. David hired Michael Ovitz, the most feared agent in Hollywood. Ovitz had every network and syndicator in the business line up to make offers. NBC panicked and came back with The Tonight Show after all. Except you got to wait till 94, Dave. However, on January 14th, 1993, David Letterman announced he was going to CBS. He did his last late night with David Letterman on June 25th. Tom Hanks, your guest, Bruce Springsteen playing Glory Days. And that was it. We'll talk about

3:54 the guy who replaced him in next week's episode. Meanwhile, CBS went all in. The contract was three years at $ 14 million a year. That was double what David Letterman had been making. The network bought the Ed Sullivan Theater on Broadway for $ 4 million and then spent millions more rebuilding it. All told, CBS reportedly put more than $ 140 million into getting David Letterman on the air at 1130. Late Show with David Letterman premiered on August 30, 1993. 23 million people watched. I was one of them. Bill Murray was the first guest. Same guy that was the first guest back in 1982 on Late Night. Paul Newman stood up in the audience and yelled, where the hell are the singing cats? And walked out because he thought he'd bought tickets to a musical. That's 1230 style humor to me. During the monologue, Tom Brokaw from NBC News came out on stage and pulled two cue cards out of the stack and said, these last two jokes are the intellectual property of NBC. Dave joked, who would have thought you'd ever hear the words intellectual property and NBC in the same sentence? The bit was funny because it was true. NBC had gone through the old show with lawyers.

4:52 Viewer mail had to become the CBS mailbag. I'm just like shaking my head even reading you that sentence. The world's most dangerous band couldn't use that name anymore. So they became the CBS orchestra. Even the name Larry Bud Melman belonged to NBC. So the sweet old guy who would open the very first late night show had to appear under his real name, Calvert DeForest. Dave did get to keep Stupid Petrix because that came from the morning show and he owned it. Dave also kept top 10 because you can't copyright a list. That first year was awesome. I think I watched every episode. Then somewhere along the way, Establishment Dave, as I call it, started to creep in. For two years, everything was going the way CBS had hoped. Dave beat Leno in the ratings. Then in February of 1994, CBS had the Winter Olympics and Dave sent his mother to Norway as a correspondent. America fell in love with Dave's mom. Dave was on magazine covers. He was the biggest thing in TV. The guy who lost The Tonight Show was winning. Now for me... There's no moment where I got mad at David Letterman. It just didn't fit my life the same way 1230 had. I was a little older, now into my mid-20s, and when I did tune in, it just wasn't as much fun. At 1230, there were the Carson Rules, which forced more creativity, in my opinion. At 1130, there were no rules. The khakis and the sneakers were replaced by double-breasted suits and shoes.

6:08 Dave could book anybody, so he booked everybody. He had the same movie stars who were showing up on all the other shows. He could even do things like stump the band with an exact bid Carson told him he couldn't do. You might want to sum up Establishment Day by looking at the top 10 list. In 1995, top 10 started as a joke about how dumb lists were. By the mid-90s, it was the most famous comedy segment in America. There were top 10 books. It got delivered by astronauts, presidential candidates, and Super Bowl winners. It was funny, but a parody of a hacky TV segment had become the most dependable TV segment on the air. Nobody was in on a joke anymore because there wasn't a joke to be in on. The stuff I missed made sense at 1230. Now, there was no five-story tower, nothing getting crushed in a hydraulic press, no Chris Elliott. The whole thing was more grown up, and I will keep using the word establishment. The punk kid who had made fun of show business was now running the biggest show in the business out of the Ed Sullivan Theater. So if 1230 was great, 1130 was pretty good. But for a lot of us who found David 1230, pretty good at 1130 when we had to get up for work in the morning now?

7:11 Not enough. In 1995, Dave hosted the Oscars. It did not go well. He did the infamous Oprah, Uma, Uma, Oprah bit. It died in the room. Dave spent the next 20 years making fun of himself for it. Then the big moment, July 10th, 1995. Hugh Grant went on The Tonight Show a couple weeks after getting arrested with a prostitute and Jay Leno asked him, what the hell were you thinking? The Tonight Show won that night and basically never gave the lead back to David Letterman. Also around that time, CBS had lost the NFL to Fox. A bunch of stations had switched affiliations from CBS to Fox, so Dave's lead-in shrank. But maybe it was simpler than that, because once Dave was doing a regular talk show, he was up against a guy who was very, very good at doing a regular talk show, and who wanted it more.

7:57 The show got more ordinary, and Dave got more interesting. At 1230, the show was the star Dave hid behind it. He was famously the most guarded man on TV, the guy who'd make a joke before he'd tell you one true thing about himself. Over the next 20 years at CBS, that guy came apart on the air one piece at a time. You might not have seen it every night, but there were nights he heard about it the next morning and you went and found it. One of the first moments was a small one, May 13th, 1994. I was watching that night because Dave was doing shows in Los Angeles and Johnny Carson walked out to deliver the top 10 list. Johnny sat down behind Dave's desk for a moment. It's a great moment. Got a standing ovation and left without saying a word. Johnny's face is like, Huh, do I belong behind a desk? This is kind of comfortable. No, no, no, I shouldn't do that. It was the last time Johnny Carson ever appeared on television, and he did it on David Letterman's show on CBS, not The Tonight Show. For the rest of his life, Johnny Carson would quietly send Dave jokes for the monologue. When Carson died in January of 2005, Dave came back on the air and did an entire monologue of jokes that Johnny Carson had written and only told the audience afterward where they'd come from.

9:03 Welcome to The Late Show. How about this for bad news here in New York City? The basic cab fare, say you're from out of town, you want to take a cab someplace. The basic cab fare has gone up from $ 2 to $ 2. 50. $ 2 to $ 2. 50. Or as any cab driver in New York City can tell you, that's a 22 rupee increase. Well, here was a sad story. I hated to hear about this. Paris Hilton, you know Paris Hilton? Paris Hilton has a dog named Tinkerbell, and Tinkerbell was missing for a while. Don't worry, they found Tinkerbell.

9:48 They found the dog. Tinkerbell was with the Taco Bell Chihuahua making a sex video. So that's a happy ending. On January 14th, 2000, a routine checkup turned into an emergency quintuple bypass surgery for David Letterman. He was 52. Five weeks later, he returned to air February 21st. The first joke was a Dave joke. He told it better, but I'll do my best here. After what I've been through, I'm just happy to be wearing clothing that opens in the front. Then he did something that the 1230 guy never would have done. Dave brought out eight members of his medical team onto the stage, the doctors and the nurses, introduced them one at a time, and thanked them for saving his life, and he could barely get through it. People like me had spent years seeing Dave being detached, and there he was, simply being grateful.

10:37 A year and a half later was a night everyone remembers, September 17th, 2001. Dave was the first late-night host back on the air six days after the attack's in a theater a few miles from where the Twin Towers had been. I recently covered that on Daily Comedy News. You can check out that episode in that feed. I discussed that episode for 15 minutes there, so I'll keep it short here. Dave didn't do a monologue. He sat at the desk and said he wasn't sure he should be doing a show at all because for 20 years we've been in the city making fun of everything. Then there's October 1st, 2009. This one less flattering. Dave sat down at the desk and told the audience he had a story for them. He said three weeks earlier he'd found a package in the backseat of his car. Inside was a letter from someone who said he knew Dave had done terrible things and that there would be a screenplay about them unless Dave paid $ 2 million. The audience laughed because they assumed it was a bid. Dave kept going. Dave said he'd gone to the Manhattan District Attorney. The man had been handed a phony $ 2 million check and was arrested. Then Dave told the audience, I've had sex with women who work for me on this show. Dave apologized on the air a few days later to his wife and to his staff. It was one of the most gripping 10 minutes of television David Letterman ever did. and was a man admitting to something that would have ended most careers, and probably as far away from detached, call it 1985 David Letterman, as he would ever get. After that, things loosened up. The last five or six years of The Late Show were a different guy. Dave became a father later in life than most people. He talked about his son Harry all the time. Dave stopped pretending to be interested in movie stars and started having real conversations with politicians and getting mad at them. In September of 2008,

12:09 John McCain canceled at the last minute, saying he had to rush back to Washington to deal with the financial crisis. Dave found out McCain was actually down the street doing Katie Couric and put the live feed of McCain getting his makeup done on the air and tore McCain apart for an hour. Here's this thing with John McCain. You know, a couple of weeks ago, John McCain was supposed to be on the show. And at the last minute, he calls me up. And I got a lot of respect. You get a call from a senator. You get a call from a guy who's a bona fide war hero. All of a sudden, you know, your lips start to vibrate. So I said, sure, whatever you want. And he says, look, Dave, the economy is about to crater. It's about to crater, his word. And I have to rush back to Washington to save the economy. And so it made me feel puny. So I said, OK, Senator, do what you have to do.

12:55 Rush right back to Washington. And then I hung up and I felt like a patriot. I felt like I had done my part. And he was supposed to be on the show like an hour later. So now we're in a hole, but everybody has to pull together in economic hardship time. So we all pull together, and we get that guy with the big head from MSNBC. What's his name? Keith Olbermann. Yeah, giant head. So he comes over, and he's good. He's very good. So now, it turns out, not only did he not rush back to Washington, he spent the night here in New York City, went on Katie Couric, he was on Conan, he was on Regis, he was everywhere. Thank you. So now, in an attempt to save his campaign, they're talking about coming back. You see what I'm saying? So we said, sure, we would love you to come back. And even on the phone, he said, I'll bring, what's her name?

13:47 Sarah, right. So. Now, but they're being squirrely. Politicians can be squirrely because we got a date picked, and we do this show every afternoon at 5.30. He wants to do the show at 5. So one, we have no guarantee he's going to show up, period. And we've kind of already rearranged our schedule on his behalf to save the economy, right? By getting that big-headed kid in here to talk about the politics. You know what I'm driving? I just don't know if we can trust him.

14:31 When NBC blew up The Tonight Show in 2010, we'll get to that. Nobody enjoyed it more than Dave. Every day I wake up and I say I'm going to keep my mouth shut about this NBC Tonight Show thing because. Honestly, folks, I don't have a dog in this fight. But here's the deal. I've known Jay Leno for, I don't know, 35 years, a long, long time. And we used to buddy around in the old days. And what we're seeing now is kind of vintage Jay. And it's enjoyable for me to see this. It's like, hey, there he is. There's the guy I know. And I just thought, well, I better keep my mouth shut because, you know, Lord knows I got my own problems. Really, I got my own problems. But I just can't help myself.

15:25 And while it's true I don't specifically have a dog in this fight, I think that in some way I and Paul are responsible for the mess that's taking place over there now. We're responsible. Yes, because of the big stink that we created when we left NBC years and years ago, they said, okay, well, that'll never happen again. Right. Well, that's why Jay says he was going to retire five years ago just to avoid that. That's right. They wanted to avoid another transitional brouhaha. If I can invoke a little French. Please do. Anytime. So last night, Jay gave his State of the Network speech. He did.

16:06 State of the Network. State of the Network. State of the Network speech. And he said that we should not blame Conan for what's going on. Don't blame Conan. Don't blame Conan for what's going on. And I said to myself, no one is blaming Cohen. But by then he wasn't the rebel. He was the old guy at the end of the bar who'd seen everything and didn't care what you thought. And a lot of people who would drift away in the 90s found that they liked this version of the guy. On April 3rd, 2014, David Letterman told the audience he was retiring. The final Late Show with David Letterman aired May 20th, 2015. Almost 14 million people watched. I was one of them, and it was the first Late Show I had watched in quite some time. The last top 10 was things people had always wanted to say to Dave, read by Bill Murray, Steve Martin, Jerry Seinfeld, Tina Fey, Chris Rock, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and a few more. The Foo Fighters came by, and just reading that list, it's kind of the opposite of Chris Elliott under the seats yelling at someone. The show had become establishment. Dave had done more than 6,000 shows between the two networks. He never did get to Tonight Show, and by the end, I don't think anybody thought he needed it. So that's Dave. For 11 years at 1230, he made the best talk show I've ever seen. For 22 years at 1130, he made a pretty good one.

17:23 But let's go back to 1993. David Letterman had left 1230 and NBC had a problem. Somebody had to do the 1230 show. Lorne Michaels was put in charge of finding the new person. And he could add pretty much anybody in America. Maybe you grab Gary Shandling, somebody like that. Lorne Michaels picked a 30-year-old writer from The Simpsons who had never hosted anything. Nobody ever heard of him. And that's next week on Is Late Night Dead? I'm Johnny Mack, and thanks for staying up late. All right, that's pretty much all I got. The only thing I have left to do for the last time on a television program, thank you and good night.