The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [125]
“Hey, John,” Letterman yelled into the monitor, only starting to get revved up. “I’ve got a question! You need a ride to the airport?” Egged on by his fill-in guest, the pro-Democratic MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, Letterman questioned McCain’s motivation for what seemed to Dave like a PR stunt. “You don’t suspend your campaign,” Dave said, mixing comic delivery with righteous anger. “No, because that makes me think, well, you know, maybe there will be other things down the road. If he’s in the White House, he might just suspend being president. I mean, we’ve got a guy like that now!”
The event became part of the news cycle in the race. McCain had stiffed Letterman, and Dave made him pay. He got more licks in on McCain for several nights after, and McCain ultimately had to make a date in his otherwise packed calendar to return to New York (a state he was hardly going to win) on October 16 to formally seek Dave’s pardon.
For the Lettermanites, the McCain episode underscored what they saw as the gravitas Dave now brought to the role of late-night host, another quality they believed set him apart. No one could picture Jay, for example, rising up and chastising a presidential candidate for reneging on a booking.
“He’s bigger now than almost anyone who sits across from him,” Rob Burnett said. “On his home turf, sitting behind that desk, where he’s sat for so many years, you get the feeling that with whoever it is there, sitting across from him, Dave has the upper hand.”
That kind of framing was no accident. What Burnett and other staff members of the show and Worldwide Pants sought to convey was that Letterman had assumed, formally, the mantle held for so long by Carson. Not the “King” thing, but rather the cultural relevance thing. The monologues Dave began performing—Johnny-style ones—played right along with that. Dave not only did more jokes, but more pointed jokes, sharper, tougher material.
The lengthening of the monologue brought with it a reshaping of the first act of the show. For years, the format had been: Dave’s opening routine, followed by a brief piece of music from Paul Shaffer and the band while Dave did his walkover to his desk. From there he would jump into whatever had been planned for the next piece of comedy. The act had gotten so long that the first commercial break came much deeper into the show, a fact that actually hurt Letterman’s ratings, because shows had started to be measured by how many people were watching the commercials, not the programs themselves. On Tonight, Jay had always ended his monologue and thrown right to a commercial—so that first ad was invariably on earlier than Dave’s. That had become another ratings advantage Jay’s show enjoyed. With the longer monologue, Late Show could switch to a similar commercial rotation, with the first ad following the monologue. It might even help in the ratings.
To feed the new structure, Late Show began hiring more writers specifically to work on the monologue. Dave started stretching out the joke quotient, eventually pushing it up to sixteen, then eighteen, then twenty a night. When some in the press noticed, they leapt to the immediate conclusion that Dave was intent on stealing away Jay viewers, who liked to hear a lot of topical material.
The reason for the monologue expansion had more to do with Dave looking for a way to reinvent his television act—again. He had done that with resounding success in 1993 when he jumped to CBS, but more significantly, invaded the eleven thirty time period.
The prevailing challenge for Dave in 1993 was supposed to be—as Conan’s was—broadening out the show, though even then the concept was difficult to define. Should Dave be less edgy, more conventional, less innovative? At the time, one of Letterman’s top producers, Robert Morton, had tried to simplify