David Letterman: Is He the New King of Late-Night TV or Just the Pride of Indianapolis?

Resurrection after Midnight

As in so many sectors of the United States economy, a once seemingly invincible profit magnet, the talk show, is suddenly facing the specter of decline. The problem is that old industrial bugaboo, aging equipment; in this case, the talk-show host. Just look at the inventory: Merv Griffin, a Model T in a Toyota world; Mike Douglas, obsolete; John Davidson, bankrupt; Tom Snyder, closed for repairs; Dinah, out of business; Donahue, boring. Even the mighty Carson Corp., once the Sony of talk shows, now suffers Nielsen slippage, and its bid for foreign export is meeting stiff resistance in Britain, where consumers can't digest the durable Johnny jape without a bilingual dictionary.

Perhaps the one factor preventing total collapse of the industry has been the inability of the Japanese to dump their slimmed-down, economical, superefficient talk shows on the American market, because of that apparently insurmountable language barrier.

Faced with this massive challenge, U.S. television executives have risen to it with their usual flair, accomplishing almost nil. In truth, only one individual has attempted to revitalize the fading industry. Let us now examine his strategy, tactics, style, sex life, taste in clothing and favorite restaurants so we may determine, insofar as is possible, whether the talk show as we now know it will survive into the twenty-first century or will be replaced by video games.

Years of Crisis

Every great man (or woman! or child!) at some time in his (or her or its) career faces the inevitable time of testing, the defeat from which he or they either bounce back — and become rich and famous — or curl up and die, never again being written up in a major magazine article like this one. Think of Napoleon on Elba. MacArthur and the Philippines. Garber of Batavia. (See? He couldn't bounce back, so you never heard of him.)

For David Letterman, the crisis came in the fall of 1980, when his first talk show expired after eight months on NBC. Letterman faced this crushing setback with all the grit and determination that have characterized this country from the start.

"I just figured, well, my one shot on TV has come and gone, and that's it," he recalls, "and I would be destined to doing guest shots on The Love Boat for the rest of my life."

For an upcoming captain of show biz, he's kind of a worrywart, this Letterman.