Letterman will leave the late night arena as it's longest serving host. By the time he hangs up his microphone he will have 6,028 episodes of "Late Night" the "Late Show" under his belt.
The news comes with finality. Beginning next summer, Dave won't be there to provide his take on current events, give us a Top 10 list or banter with Paul. The occasion will be a somewhat sad one for me, but it doesn't seem to have the gravity behind it as when Johnny Carson retired. Maybe it's because Johnny was the only game in town when he left compared to these days where there are many other offerings at 11:30. It could also be that maybe my tastes have change. Maybe it's that Dave has changed.
I was one of those teenagers that would fight sleep to stay up on Friday nights to watch Dave. It was the night when he read viewer mail, one of my favorite bits. Sometimes I would tape his show during the week just to see what he would come up with to break the barriers of TV. To say that he was an influence on me is a huge understatement. Tina Fey remarked during Letterman's induction at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012 that most of the guys she knew in high school and college wanted to be David Letterman. They repeated his jokes, his mannerisms, and even the way he dressed. Tina Fey described me as I was in the 1980s.
But things changed. I don't watch much TV after 11:00 pm anymore. I usually keep up with the late night shows the next day either on the DVR or online. Chalk that up to job responsibilities.
Maybe it's because that I got tired of Dave. I think that it started to happen in 2009 after the news came out regarding his affairs with staffers of his show. It was unconscionable to think that Dave would cheat on his marriage. I'm not one to judge, but the whole situation left a bad taste in my mouth. I give him credit for working on that problem and for working on saving his marriage.
Another reason is that his humor wasn't as cutting as it used to be. Letterman was a master at turning broadcasting on its ear back in the day. He broke the conventional wisdom of how a talk show was done. He took ideas from Steve Allen and Ernie Kovacs and worked them for a new, young audience of TV viewers who weren't around to see those two comedians in their prime. Whether it was being dunked in a vat of water wearing a suit made of Alka Seltzer or disrupting the Channel 4 news down the hall at NBC it was inventive. We had never seen anything like it before. Dave also wasn't afraid to take on his guests and would find a way to knock them down a peg or two.
The David Letterman we see today is a shadow of what we saw in the 80's and early 90s. His talk show is more conventional. He is more polite to his guests, and we rarely see him attempting a stunt that would be talked about at work or school the next morning. His monologues are often one-sided politically and sometimes it seems as if he is phoning it in.
Don't get me wrong, I am still a fan of David Letterman's. He was an influence to me when I started out in broadcasting, and when I try to use humor in everyday situations. There are many moments and memories that he created over the years and they will be ones that we will remember for a long time. I'll be one of the millions that will fight sleep on May 20, 2015 to tune in and salute a TV legend.
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