There’s something that I observed about the TV show Twin Peaks: if you do something in a non-linear fashion for long enough, it becomes linear. The show is remembered for its first anarchic year, but its second season (after which it was summarily cancelled) is less remembered because it wasn't very memorable. The unpredictable became familiar. After finding new and different ways of being new and different, it got old.
The same principle is also applicable to David Letterman, who did idiosyncratic material on late night for so long that it came to seem normal. Letterman no longer seems so odd because we live in a post-Letterman world.
Letterman left his late night TV perch this week with an avalanche of well-wishes and people talking about he “changed late night.” He didn't really change late night, he just made it sillier (which is not a bad thing). Late night shows still feature a white guy coming out from behind a curtain, doing 5 minutes of stand-up, bantering with his band leader/henchman from a desk, and then talking to show biz types hawking their latest movie/TV show/CD. James Cordon, taking over Dave’s old spot on NBC’s Late Late Show, has tried tweaking the formula but it still is what it is.
The truth is, David Letterman didn't want to change late night. He was always the underdog, the smart ass kid in the back of the class, the insurrectionist. He didn't want to change late night; he just wanted to see what happened when you threw stuff off of a tall building. Or ran over stuff with a steam roller.
Almost all of Letterman’s “innovations” date back to his early show on NBC weekday mornings. Some were refined on his NBC late late gig, but by the time he got to CBS, the cake was done. He relied on old reliables (that’s WHY they’re called “old reliables”) like the Top Ten list, and as years went by he did less of the crazy stuff like monkey-cam. This is why he was different: other talk show hosts tried to be as cool as Johnny Carson, but Letterman never stopped being a guy from Indiana who got paid to throw stuff off a tall building or run over stuff with a steam roller.
One thing that never wavered was Letterman’s willingness to bite the hand that fed him. On his next to last show he ran a clip of CBS affiliates mistakenly saying he was leaving The Tonight Show, with a final one saying “he was kinda hard to watch.” He managed to make the employees of his employer look foolish, while being self-deprecating at the same time. Unlike Jay Leno (who never seemed to want to offend ANYONE), Letterman could be a little mean, but he always backed it up by portraying himself as the biggest goofball on Earth.
Despite all the silliness, there was also an element of gravitas with Letterman than Leno, Conan O’Brien, and the “Jimmies” Kimmel and Fallon never quite had. After the events of 9/11, it was Letterman who gave the country, and the city that was his adopted home, permission to carry on. He addressed his quadruple bypass surgery openly, as he did with an embarrassing sexual harassment scandal involving Late Show staff.
David Letterman’s greatest genius was that he pretended not to be a genius. As with Johnny Carson, he was a product of the Midwest and never stopped presenting himself as an average guy who got very lucky. But he was able to get away with so much, to be so subversive, because he was smart enough to know what he could get away with. As someone who worked on his show said, his philosophy was to go up to the edge, but not over. He was subversive, but he was not Howard Stern.
Letterman was a unique voice on television, an institution that often reveres stolidity and familiarity over innovation. Conan can be a little cheeky, but in watching Conan you can rarely forget that he went to Harvard. Fallon is a little too much like his predecessor, Jay Leno, in trying to appear to be a nice guy. Kimmel is the closest in attitude to Letterman, but he often lacks Letterman’s empathy with his guests.
Stephen Colbert is an apt replacement for Letterman, someone who is both funny and smart, with grounded sensibilities and a taste for the absurd. TV is diminished without David Letterman, just as it was diminished without Steve Allen, Ernie Kovacs, and Johnny Carson. And TV will go on.
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