Day: May 22, 2015

David Letterman’s Late Show finale attracts record audience

Comic celebrities turned out for David Letterman’s late-night farewell — and so did his biggest audience in more than 21 years.

The Nielsen company said Thursday that 13.76 million viewers saw Letterman end his 33-year career as a late-night TV host with a final show Wednesday night. The last time Letterman had so many viewers was in February 1994, when his show aired after CBS’ telecast of the Winter Olympics.

More people watched Letterman than anything else in prime time on Wednesday night. Letterman’s final show started at 11:35 p.m. and lasted more than an hour as CBS let it run long.

Jay Leno’s farewell last February was seen by 14.6 million viewers.

Letterman was ushered into retirement by four presidents who declared “our long national nightmare is over” and saying there was nothing he could ever do to repay his audience.

The taped intro of President Barack Obama and former Presidents George Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush referenced President Gerald Ford’s declaration to the country when he took office following the 1974 resignation of Richard Nixon. Letterman sidled up to Obama to say, “you’re just kidding, right?”

Ten stars from Steve Martin to Tina Fey delivered the final Top Ten list of “things I’ve always wanted to say to Dave.” Julia Louis-Dreyfus, with Jerry Seinfeld standing nearby, said, “Thanks for letting me take part in another hugely disappointing series finale.”

Number One was Bill Murray: “Dave, I’ll never have the money I owe you.”

Letterman joked in his monologue that he’s been on the air for so long that the hot show when he started was “Keeping Up with the Gabors.”

“You want to know what I’m going to do now that I’m retired?” he said. “By God, I hope to become the new face of Scientology.”

Letterman said goodbye after 6,028 broadcasts of his late-night shows on CBS and NBC. True to his self-deprecating style, he said Stephen Hawking estimated that tenure delivered “about eight minutes of laughter.”

Letterman will be replaced in September by Stephen Colbert, who he endorsed by saying, “I think he’ll do a wonderful job.”

The final Late Show broadcast ran long, some 17 minutes over its usual hour, and CBS planned to let the show air without cutting it. Some Canadian viewers in the Eastern time zone were jarred when at 12:35 ET, with Letterman in the middle of a heartfelt closing message from his desk, the feed on some CTV channels switched to a recorded program for several minutes.

From his start on NBC’s Late Night in February 1982, Letterman’s comedy was about more than telling jokes. He attached a camera to a monkey’s back, tossed watermelons off a roof and wore a suit of Alka-Seltzer to plunge into a tank of water. Celebrities used to being fawned over either clicked with his prickly personality or didn’t, and when Cher called him “an asshole,” it became a memorable moment.

He shifted to CBS in 1993 when NBC gave the Tonight Show to Jay Leno instead of Letterman, a slight he never forgot or forgave.

Letterman even began his final monologue Wednesday by joking, “It’s beginning to look like I’m not going to get the Tonight Show.”

The tricks subsided as Letterman mellowed with age and fatherhood. His audience welcomed him back after a heart bypass, listened as he became the first late-night host back on the air after the 2001 terrorist attacks and saw him acknowledge to inappropriately having sex with a subordinate.

“When I screw up now, and Lord knows I’ll be screwing up, I’ll have to go on somebody else’s show to apologize,” Letterman said.

Letterman, whose wife Regina and son Harry were in the audience, was serenaded at the end by the band Foo Fighters. They sang Everlong, the same song they played when he returned following heart surgery in February 2000.

Late night hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Conan O’Brien each encouraged viewers to watch Letterman instead or watch their own shows later through DVR technology.

His last few weeks have been warmly nostalgic, with Letterman entertaining old friends like Murray, Tom Hanks, George Clooney and Julia Roberts. Anticipating the end, viewers sent Letterman to the top of the late-night ratings the week before last for the first time since Jimmy Fallon took over at NBC’s Tonight Show and they competed with original telecasts.

Letterman, before saying goodbye, thanked virtually everyone involved with the show from CBS Corp. Chairman Leslie Moonves to his researchers and crew members.

“It’s so obvious every night and again tonight that they were so much better at their jobs than I am at my job,” he said.

Letterman remained dry-eyed throughout the broadcast, but several audience members who filed out of the Ed Sullivan Theater had tears in their eyes.

“He was guarded but you could tell it was really hard for him,” said John Bernstein, who flew in from Los Angeles to attend the final taping. “You could see his emotion. But I think he’s feeling a lot more than he’s showing.”

Inside David Letterman’s Late Show Finale Party: Stars, Foo Fighters, Tears (Not Dave’s) and an Early Wakeup Call!

After the Foo Fighters capped off the final episode of the Late Show With David Letterman on Wednesday with “Everlong,” a tune very near and dear to the outgoing host’s heart, the party continued into the night.

The Late Show staff, Dave Grohl and his bandmates and a bunch of the celebrities who appeared on the show to read the last-ever Top Ten list, including Jim Carrey, Tina Fey and Steve Martin, all trooped over to the nearby Museum of Modern Art to fete Letterman—who looked as if he raided pal Bill Murray’s closet before leaving the Ed Sullivan Theatre.

Of course, the baggy striped pants, yellow Foo Fighters concert T-shirt and leisurely cream blazer probably all belong to Dave—so now we know that streetwear style is just another thing that he and Murray bond over.

A source tells E! News that Letterman only stopped by the MOMA party briefly and, unlike many of the staff members, the 68-year-old TV veteran didn’t look emotional at all. (His farewell speech last night, while incredibly touching and pitch pefect, was notably devoid of tears—not that, knowing Dave, we expected anything different.)

Guests mingled as the Foo Fighters performed and, though Letterman ducked out early, the remaining now-former Late Show staffers took the party to McGee’s Pub (the inspiration for MacLaren’s in How I Met Your Mother) after leaving MOMA.

Meanwhile, crew members were actually due back at the Ed Sullivan Theatre at 8 a.m. today to clean out their offices and dismantle the set.

So…maybe another round at McGee’s tonight is already sounding pretty good.

David Letterman’s departure marks end of an era

When David Letterman does his final Top 10 next week it will signal the end of the longest late-night hosting career in U.S. TV network history and the end of an era.

The 68-year-old whose acerbic wit once made him a renegade in the late-night world announced last year that he was hanging up his hat after 22 years behind the Late Show desk.

His retirement, which begins after his last show on May 20, turns the page on a three-decade career.

The late-night TV landscape was a very different place in the 1970s when the gap-toothed comedian got his big break on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

When NBC’s Late Night wth David Letterman debuted in 1982, Letterman earned his reputation as the rebellious kid on the comedy block with his absurdist, cynical and pencil-throwing style of humour.

Sixteen Emmys and 30-odd years later, Letterman’s shtick is showing some wear. When comedic contemporary Jay Leno announced he was throwing in the towel at The Tonight Show after 22 years, Letterman knew it was time to call it quits.

“If you look around at the other people [hosting late night] and look at me, it’s almost like a pair of shoes you haven’t worn in a hundred years,” Letterman told Rolling Stone magazine.

“I still enjoy what I’m doing,” he said. “But I think what I’m doing is not what you want at 11:30 anymore.”

The new kings of late night, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel, have completely reinvented the late-night game, focusing more on creating viral videos than on sit-down interviews or written jokes.

But they owe the success of some of that reinvention to the pioneering Letterman, who originated many of their bits, according to bestselling New York Times writer Bill Carter, who penned two books on the topic: The Late Shift and The War for Late Night.

“Letterman did a lot of this stuff,” Carter said in an interview with CBC. “Jimmy Fallon loves to do games with the guests … Well, Letterman did stuff like that. He had them do elevator races in 30 Rock hallways. He interviewed guests in barber chairs instead of regular chairs.”

Despite being the trailblazer in innovative interviews, Carter said Letterman lost his edge because he simply stopped performing.

“He was outplayed because he stopped playing,” said Carter, who says Letterman didn’t like leaving the studio to record remotes for the show.

Even Letterman himself admits that he’s not up to compete in world of YouTube dominance.

“I hear about things going viral, and I think, ‘How do you do that?'” he told Rolling Stone. “I think I’m the blockage in the plumbing.”

Stephen Colbert, who takes over for Letterman on Sept. 8, will have to simultaneously fill the icon’s shoes and bring new energy to the Late Show.

The 50-year-old, who is best known for Comedy Central’s satirical news show The Colbert Report, will also have to play the YouTube game, while finding his niche in a pretty full playground.

Competing with Colbert and the Jimmys are NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers and CBS’s The Late Late Show with James Corden.

Norm Sousa, who is the host of the only Canadian late-night comedy show Too Much Information, said the viral video phenomenon can’t last.

“We are talking about seven or eight late night shows trying to have two to three viral videos a week,” said Sousa, in an interview with CBC. “If you do the math, I just don’t think it’s sustainable.”

The competition has created what Sousa calls a “late-night renaissance,” but the the comedic battle royale won’t be televised, he said.

“It’ll be interesting to see how it will all pan out,” he said. “[But] I don’t think that late-night comedy will survive on TV.”

Instead, he said, internet streaming services like Neflix and Hulu will inevitably get the last laugh.