late night television
In the interregnum between the end of David Letterman’s NBC show and the start of his CBS show, that wacky “Late Night Wars” jumbling over Johnny Carson’s successor, NBC ran reruns, somewhat skewed from what what I now believe came out of the 1988 Writers’ strike. It wasn’t something I was particularly cognicient of this idea at the time, but it popped into my mind when reading Peter Ames Carlin on this:
Recall how “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson and then-“Late Night” host David Letterman reached unforeseen heights of weirdness, and often hilarity, by facing their audiences night after night with almost no prepared material. Letterman, famously, got a shave on the air. Carson was just his charming, bone-dry self.
I think that NBC was running through a catalouge of non-repeated episodes spanning the previous four years that summer– Mondays were repeats, and add the regular vacations, and the episodes that “demanded” to be repeated, such as the one where he received a shave, surely were already done. So what I ended up watching, at that summer vacation where I had no reason to wake up early the next morning, having found myself a Letterman fan, was a random phone conversation with a woman from an office building across the street. And that was the concept for the “sketch” portion of the show for the entire week. Those non-scripted programs tended to be a bit… dull. I am not sure what Peter Carlin is talking about, but Maybe I really should have just gone to bed.
Today, I don’t know that Letterman has something in it. Besides which, the politics of the situation seems to require the late night denziens stand in solidarity with the writers, and the way the strike was set up it seems as though there is a bit of a … dare I say, script to it, where the writers have offered up as congenial an end-game for the Production companies to come to the proper terms as is possible with a Strike. (And, from my vantage point, the writers seem to deserve what they’re demanding, a nod to the changing realities of how their product is disseminated, ergo DVD sales and the Internet).