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After tonight, David Letterman will be the longest-serving host in late-night TV history. He is responsible for expanding our understanding of what late night television could be. He is also, in a funny way, responsible for the complete destruction of late night TV. He started out in the hour after Johnny Carson, and you could argue that — especially in the early years — Letterman’s show represented a complete deconstruction of the whole Carson model. A sketch like “Stupid Pet Tricks” was a knowing mockery of an animals-being-cute late-night segment. Letterman’s Late Night was a subversion of the traditional nightly talk show, as surely as The Simpsons was a subversion of the family sitcom or The Wire was a subversion of the cop drama. Letterman’s deconstruction opened the floodgates — if Letterman was making fun of the idea of a talk show, then Conan O’Brien was making fun of the idea of making fun of a talk show. The whole voice-of-god notion of the Johnny Carson host was a thing of the past. READ FULL STORY »
