Letterman returns to TV his own way

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This article was published 13/01/2018 (3177 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When he left, he said he was glad to be gone; that he had nothing left to say on late-night television.

Two-and-a-half years later, it’s clear David Letterman still has a few things on his mind. And that TV remains the forum in which he feels best suited to say them.

Letterman, 70, returns to the small screen — and, for that matter, any other device on which you consume streaming content — this week with the debut of the new Netflix series My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman. The six-part, 60-minute series finds the still-bearded, but business-suit-attired Dave sitting down for extended conversations with subjects whom the host thinks sufficiently interesting to be worthy of an extended chat.

It’s obvious now, as this new effort unfolds at a decidedly measured pace (a new instalment will be made available on Netflix each month), that it wasn’t television in general that Letterman had grown tired of, after 30-plus years behind a talk-show desk; rather, it was the formatted nature of his past endeavours, the repetition, the daily grind and the requirement, because of the cross-promotional nature of the genre, to suffer through the endless stream of conversations with showbiz types with not all that much to say beyond pre-packaged quips about a latest movie or TV show.

It took many years for Letterman to hit his confabulatory stride, but when he finally developed a rhythm and a comfort level, he was very good at the “talk” part of the talk-show gig.

With the departure of Dave and CBS stablemate Craig Ferguson from late night, it appeared for a short time that the art of after-hours conversation was doomed; fortunately, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert began taking an earnest interest in maintaining at least a modicum of intelligent late-night discourse.

It’s easy to see how and why Letterman was lured back.

First, he was, and undoubtedly still is, an extremely driven person and has surely not lost the deep-rooted need for attention and affirmation that resides in all comedians; and second, the Netflix format gives him the opportunity to do exactly what he wants, with whom he pleases, at a pace that suits the energy level of someone of his advance years.

Having tried his hand at non-mainstream TV as a roaming guest correspondent on the season 2 première of Years of Living Dangerously, Showtime’s documentary series focused on global warming (he travelled to south Asia to assess India’s electrical-power grid), Letterman seems to have found the idea of occasional television quite appealing.

The guest list for the initial six-pack of My Next Guest instalments sets the stage for a fascinating and diverse array of conversations (one assumes it will continue as long as Letterman remains inspired). After former U.S. president Barack Obama, Letterman is scheduled to sit down, both inside and outside the traditional studio setting, with George Clooney, Malala Yousafzai, JAY-Z, Tina Fey and Howard Stern.

A preview of the first instalment of My Next Guest was not made available by Netflix.

Nonetheless, it’s great to see Dave back on TV. What it isn’t, however, is particularly surprising. Some of the people closest to Letterman during his long late-night career saw this return coming even before he’d officially departed.

In an extensive Rolling Stone profile of Letterman that was published shortly before his Late Show sign-off in 2015, longtime head writer (and eventual CEO of Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants) Rob Burnett summed it up this way:

“Weirdly, without the pressure of a network talk show, I actually think Dave could end up doing something more beautiful.

“Something smaller that doesn’t have to please everybody… The completely unadulterated version of Dave could be breathtaking.”

brad.oswald@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @BradOswald