How David Letterman Reinvented TV

Behind the scenes of the first year of 'Late Night'

September 20, 2011 12:40 PM ET

A young David Letterman in his NBC office.

Maureen Donaldson/Getty Images

The new issue of Rolling Stone, on newsstands and available now through Rolling Stone All Access, has an incredibly in-depth feature about David Letterman's groundbreaking first year on television. "He did the thing that everyone's tried to do since and has never done," Jerry Seinfeld tells Rolling Stone Contributing Editor David Browne. "Which is take the talk-show form and redo it. The mindset was, 'We're tired of pretending there are no cue cards and no cameras and nothing's rehearsed. It's late, and we're going to take over this piece of territory and do our own thing.' Now that mindset is everywhere."

Late Night With David Letterman premiered on NBC on February 1st, 1982. The producers of The Tonight Show told them that they could not book the old-school showbiz vets (Bob Newhart, Don Rickles, etc.) that frequently sat on Johnny Carson's couch. "Late Night was forced to settle for a parade of outcasts and eccentrics who helped give the show its crazy universe personality," Browne writes. "On any given night, you could stumble across the gay British writer Quentin Crisp; the intense and troubled author or Being There, Jerzy Kosinski; or a little-known journalist like Jon Alpert, who showed gripping footage of El Salvadorian guerillas attacking villages."

Other highlights from the article:

• Jimmy Kimmel says that David Letterman forever changed comedy. "You see his influence in every talk-show host – Jon Stewart, Conan, Colbert, all those guys," he says. "We're all 100 percent guilty of stealing from Letterman. That show changed everything and it changed the humor of the United States more than anything I can think of. We all got a lot cooler all of a sudden."

• Letterman's early remote bits where he would walk around Manhattan and interview perplexed local business owners also forever changed the culture. "Looking back at the early remotes, it's easy to see some of the origins of reality TV: regular folks put on camera and turned into stars," Browne writes. "Late Night's first anniversary show featured a red carpet with many of the show owners Letterman had interviewed."