We’ll get to CBS’s decision to replace David Letterman with Stephen Colbert in a couple of minutes, but first, some backstory, as they say in Hollywood, for why this all has a feeling of deja vu about it.
After an article at Vulture.com last week on David Letterman’s retirement mentioned HBO’s 1996 TV movie The Late Shift, based on the best-selling book by the New York Times’ Bill Carter, I rented the movie from Netflix (on DVD, not streaming, alas.) As Matt Zoller Seitz of Vulture writes, “I know showbiz journalists and a good many regular viewers who can recite every twist in Carter’s narrative the way Greek children used to be able to recite the highlights of the Peloponnesian war. (Remember when Leno hid in a closet and eavesdropped on his bosses?)”
It’s a fascinating curio of a (made for TV) movie, once you get through the uncanny valley effect of the actors playing Letterman, Leno, and Johnny Carson. Physically, John Michael Higgins, who plays Letterman is actually pretty spot on, but you’re always aware it’s an actor in a Letterman toupee imitating Dave’s many tics and neuroses. Daniel Roebuck, playing Jay Leno is as stiff as plywood, and wears what looks like the prow of the Titanic as a prosthetic fake chin covered in a layer of smeared-on make-up, phony looking even in the standard definition video I watched. And appearing at strategic times in the film, Rich Little plays Rich Little playing Johnny Carson. (Which must have been loads of fun for Little as payback: he was performer non gratis in the last years of the Carson Tonight Show for reasons never explained to him, despite his many appearances on the show in the ‘60s and ‘70s.)
But that’s the challenge when making any film about real-life celebrities known by millions. For the audience, if you can suspend disbelief and get past the waxworks leads, behind them are arguably the real stars of the film. These are the performers playing the behind the scenes chessboard manipulators, including Kathy Bates as Leno’s ball-breaking first manager, Helen Kushnick*, Bob Balaban as NBC executive Warren Littlefield, and Treat Williams as then-Hollywood power broker Mike Ovitz. (Who has since, as John Nolte of Big Hollywood writes, run afoul of what Ovitz called “the Gay Mafia,” in a very different cautionary tale than the main topic of our post.)
Of course, what ultimately makes The Late Shift work as a TV movie is the taut script, based on Bill Carter’s source material, which runs from a discussion between two CBS executives who want to steal Johnny Carson’s thunder by stealing away Jay Leno from the network, followed by Kushnick planting a “tip” in the New York Post that NBC was planning to replace Carson with Leno, followed by an aging, peeved Rich Little playing an aging, peeved Johnny choosing to retire at the top rather than face a bruising power struggle with NBC. NBC’s executives, Warren Littlefield, played by Balaban and Reni Santoni (“Poppy” the restaurant owner on Seinfeld) as his lieutenant, John Agoglia, both like Leno because he’s an easygoing team player, and not a petulant head case like Letterman. Once Letterman knows he won’t get the Tonight Show, he turns to Ovitz, who first helps him to break his contract with NBC, then lands him his deal with CBS, and a boxcar-sized payout.
What particularly makes The Late Shift such an interesting film is that when it was originally shot, it looked like CBS got the better of the deal, with Letterman dominating the ratings. As it turns out, according to the Internet Database:
Subsequent airings after the initial release have added an additional epilogue on how the Hugh Grant interview boosted Jay Leno’s ratings past David Letterman’s.
Thus Littlefield and Agoglia, despite being portrayed as Machiavellian manipulators on massive scale, end up looking like rather smart guys, in spite of themselves. Perhaps unintentionally, the film contrasts the difference between Letterman and Leno in the way they treat their production crews. Letterman, as big a neurotic backstage as in front of the cameras, barks at his staff after what he thinks was a bad show. An hour into the film later, when NBC decides to fire the bruising Kushnick as executive producer of the Tonight Show, Leno issues a “we’ll be OK gang, we’ll all get through this together” speech to console the troops.
As portrayed in The Late Shift, the young Leno appears fairly comfortable in his skin — offscreen, he’s a shier, more puppy dog like version of his stand-up comic persona. Letterman, as numerous critics wrote in the 1980s, is essentially an actor portraying a talk show host, trapped in the middle of the goofy whirling vortex of the first postmodern talk show that poked fun at all of the gimmicks of Big Time Network TV at its hokiest polyester worst. Late Night picked up the baton from the recently-concluded original Lorne Michaels-era of Saturday Night Live (hence the appearance of Bill Murray on Letterman’s first show). It was new and fresh and plenty of fun at 12:30 at night in the mid-’80s, particularly as a contrast to the phone-it-in final years of the much more staid Carson-era Tonight Show.
But by the 21st century, Letterman appeared to be continually bitter at first George W. Bush, then Sarah Palin, then the Tea Party, then Mitt Romney. Concurrently, since 2008, Letterman has played supine Palace Guard to Barack Obama — a kindred spirit; another postmodern impressionist of a sort. As a result, Letterman’s shtick eventually became as freeze-dried as the talk shows of the ‘60s and ‘70s he used to parody. While Letterman was born in Indianapolis, in escaping flyover country for a career in New York and Los Angeles, the hungry young comedian turned surly old man lived out a variation of the warning voiced a decade ago by Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard: “the laments of the small-town leftists get voiced with such intemperance and desperation. As if those who voice them are fighting off the nagging thought: If the Republicans aren’t particularly evil, then maybe I’m not particularly special.”
Leno, taking his cue from Johnny Carson, while very much a “Progressive” himself, is smart enough not alienate his core audience, and departed with enormous goodwill when he was pushed out by NBC this past February.
Which brings us to CBS’s decision to replace Letterman next year with Stephen Colbert. The ratings on David Letterman’s show have slipped badly in recent years, ever since Letterman’s 2006 on-air admission that he wasn’t sure if America should win in Iraq, and his attacks on Sarah Palin and her daughters, coupled with his transparent Barack boosterisms. Letterman, once the bad boy of late night, is now a 60-something keeper of the palace guard.
Letterman’s retirement would be the perfect time for CBS to find a host to replace who connects with Middle America, the massive audience that Letterman and CBS’s late night division chose to abandon. Instead, by going with Colbert, CBS chose to continue to alienate this large group of viewers. Or worse, “CBS Declares War on Heartland of America,” as Rush Limbaugh said yesterday. “Why would CBS hire such a divisive host who is already failing in Late Night?”, John Nolte pondered yesterday. “All about the left holding on to the culture.”
Of course, CBS could have chosen to replace Letterman with their 12:30 man, Craig Ferguson. Just as NBC could have gone with Letterman over Leno to succeed Carson.
In The Late Shift, there’s a scene where the actor portraying Peter Lassally, who was Carson’s liaison to Letterman, asked him if he had a penalty clause in his contract if NBC didn’t give him the Tonight Show. Yes, a million dollars, Letterman says. “That’s tip money to those guys!” Lassally dismissively replies, before telling Letterman to go see Mike Ovitz.
David Letterman’s decision to exit late night television will help pad his CBS confederate Craig Ferguson’s own retirement fund.
A clause in Ferguson’s contract with the network automatically awards the “Late Late Show” host a payday of at least $8 million if someone else is signed as Letterman’s replacement, sources told the Daily News.
And thus, as Ace notes, “Great: Leftist Crank David Letterman to be Replaced by Leftist Crank Stephen Colbert:”
I imagined CBS might have trouble imagining Ferguson as an 11:30 host (although I’m not really sure there’s such a terrific difference between an 11:30 show and a 12:30 one).
But then I don’t see how you give Ferguson the middle finger in order to hire a different oddball with a narrow appeal and a weird vibe.
Ferguson’s weird vibe is both more original and less alienating than Colbert’s own weird vibe. Sure, Ferguson’s show is essentially Pee Wee’s Playhouse, as hosted by a recovering-alcoholic Scotsman. But the weirdness — involving puppets, gay skeleton robots, and pantomime horses — wasn’t the sort of weirdness with an animus towards anyone.
Colbert says he’ll be playing himself on the new show. Well, fine… but I’ve never seen Colbert play himself before. I’ve seen him play (very well, I have to admit) the strange homophobic gay history teacher Chuck Noblet on Strangers with Candy, and I’ve seen him play a strange mutant Bill-O’Reilly-As-Glimpsed-in-Progressive-Nightmares character on clips from the Colbert Report.
Basically I’ve seen him play a lot of strange characters. I assume there’s a reason for that, that that’s his metier.
What evidence does CBS have that the real Colbert will play with a large audience?
The early-1990s CBS executives portrayed in The Late Shift left the former “Tiffany” network shortly after hiring Letterman. Too bad their successors seemed determined to live out their predecessor’s mistakes, in a seemingly unending ideological loop.
Or to paraphrase Santayana, those who fail to watch The Late Shift are doomed to repeat it.
Update: “Picking Colbert to replace Letterman? CBS really screwed up,” Kyle Smith writes today in the New York Post:
Because comedy doesn’t work unless the underlying premise rings true, just about no conservative finds Colbert funny. So, though he will be dropping the faux-con shtick when he takes over Letterman’s chair, millions of conservatives won’t be watching.
CBS is essentially writing off half the potential audience before the first episode even airs.
It does seem like an awfully tone-deaf move, but then, the ghost of Bill Paley departed Black Rock long ago.
* Who sued HBO over her portrayal according to Tom Shales, then with the Washington Post, after previously suing the New York Times’ Bill Carter over her portrayal in his original book, the Late Shift, before passing away at age 51 in 1996.
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