The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [132]
Around the same time that he was turning Monday into Friday, Dave also stopped showing up for rehearsal. The established pattern for late-night shows was to work on material through the morning and early afternoon, take it to the stage around two in the afternoon, and do a run-through. Dave had followed that routine for years—until he stopped. In lieu of a formal rehearsal, he simply familiarized himself with the material, never going to the stage to work through it.
One of his producers defended the practice, saying it was another way Dave pared down the demands of the job so he could keep doing it past sixty. In his own explanation, Dave referred to an interview with the former Dallas Cowboys running back Emmitt Smith, who had discussed, as he considered retirement, what it was about the job that he really couldn’t do anymore—the practices. Dave still liked the time on the field; what he didn’t like was the practices.
In September 2008, Letterman told Rolling Stone, in describing how the show was different and much more “host-friendly” than it used to be, “I’m not working as hard as I used to. All I have to do, really, is pick out a tie and sit down.”
The rope-a-dope strategy paid off almost immediately for Late Show. Viewers (the older ones) apparently started drifting away from Conan in his second week to catch some of Dave’s guest-loaded lineup: Howard Stern on Monday, Julia Roberts on Tuesday, Stupid Human Tricks on Wednesday.
Julia provided the first breakthrough, the first night when Dave pulled in more viewers than Conan. She teased Dave about his marriage to Regina the previous March, asking him, “Did she take your name?”
Dave said she did.
“So she’s Mrs. Letterman?” Julia wanted to know.
“No,” Letterman answered “She’s Dave.”
The shows that week were all crisp, with Letterman firing off the monologue jokes with high confidence and sparring with his guests with energy and wit.
Over at NBC, they were watching closely. One 30 Rock executive took note right away: “Dave is on his game.”
Peter Lassally thought so, too. He checked out Dave’s performance each night that week with increasing pleasure. No one had more experience evaluating what it took to make a late-night show work than Lassally, and he always put Letterman at the very top in terms of pure talent. But Dave so often tossed off shows with less than full effort, or got disgusted with himself for long periods of time and displayed that disgust—or, worse, pure anger—that the show inevitably suffered.
But when he committed, when Dave applied that potent mix of searing intelligence and scintillating wit, he could still take Peter Lassally’s breath away.
“Brett Favre announced he was retiring again—but he vowed to keep fighting for the people of Alaska.”
That week Lassally saw Letterman marching out each night and belting out a bravura monologue just as he had when he first came to CBS. “He’s got the fever!” Lassally said by midweek. The material also sounded more biting, punchier. It was all wildly above Peter’s expectations. Could it really be true? Could the old Dave be back?
Lassally couldn’t resist calling Dave—and, of course, got the old Dave on the phone. When Peter told Dave how great the monologue had been every night that week, Letterman immediately deflected the compliment.
“How’s Alice?” Dave asked, shifting the topic to Peter’s much-loved wife.
No matter how hard Lassally tried, Dave continued to shrink away from his praise, finally saying, “I don’t want to talk about that.” He simply would not let Lassally express enthusiasm about his performance.
The competition for the hearts and eyeballs of viewers under fifty, meanwhile, continued to be a mismatch. In week three, when Dave finally slipped ahead in the viewer totals by 143,000, Conan buried Letterman by half a rating point (almost 700,000 people) among the younger segment of the audience.