THE ‘80s A Special Report :...

Letterman is our last TV anti-hero. He came along at a time when the talk show format had grown bankrupt and no one wanted to admit it. The talk show wasn’t about real conversation and the individual features of character, it was about self-promotion and plugola, and his new “Late Night With David Letterman” instantly took on the refreshingly uncertain edge of self-parody.

Some of the tastelessness and exploitiveness has been trimmed from the show since its debut, but there’s still just enough of a kernel of self-hate in Letterman to insure that he’ll never quite believe his success, and therefore he’ll never be its victim.

Now the talk show genre is back with a vengeance as Oprah and Donahue and Geraldo and Sally Jessy sort through the American laundry in a renewed format that exposes just what a lonely place America can be. Lonely and loud and tacky. Letterman loves tacky, and he still has a soft spot in his heart for the human zoo. But there isn’t a lot of nourishment in his format. How long can he keep going?

The Taste Makers project was edited by David Fox, assistant Sunday Calendar editor.