It’s Getting Darker for Dave’s ‘Late Show’

Is he too cranky? Too ironic? Too . . . Dave?

David Letterman is slipping, sliding, flailing. It’s no longer Jay vs. Dave in the late-night TV battle. Leno’s “Tonight Show” has beaten Letterman’s “Late Show” in the Nielsen ratings in 200 of the past 205 weeks, or for almost four consecutive years. Nowadays, Letterman finishes well behind Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” at 11:35. He’s even wheezing to stay ahead of Conan O’Brien’s talk show, which starts at the red-eye hour of 12:35 a.m.

Since Letterman’s vaunted switch from NBC to CBS in 1993, “The Late Show With David Letterman” has shed nearly double-digit hunks of its audience every year. Last season, the number of people watching “Late Show” shrank by another 10%. Which means Letterman now attracts an audience less than half the size of the one he started with on CBS.

The losses came despite CBS’ rise to No. 1 in prime time and the network’s resumption of NFL telecasts. Theoretically, football and “Touched by an Angel” should have reversed Dave’s descent, since the big audiences watching those programs were being bombarded with “Late Show” promos. Instead, with a nightly average of 3.5 million viewers, “Late Show” now draws only 200,000 more viewers than Pat Sajak’s famously disastrous late-night talk show on CBS in 1989-90 (although Sajak admittedly didn’t have as much cable competition in his day).

Officially, CBS executives express no alarm. Financially, they say, the show remains strong with advertisers, who pay premium prices to reach Letterman’s generally affluent viewers. They point to last year’s Emmy Award (and 37 previous Emmy nominations) as evidence that Letterman’s show remains creatively strong.

“For us, it starts and ends with the quality of the show,” says Mitch Semel, CBS’ senior programming executive in New York. “Of course, we’re in the communications business, and we’re cognizant of the ratings. But we know we have the best show in late night.”

Leno, Semel says, “is a good hamburger. Dave is a great steak dinner.”

Nevertheless, CBS has begun “a fairly exhaustive” research project to analyze the late-night audience and how to bring more of it to CBS, says David Poltrack, CBS’ top research executive.

“We have a solid leadership position in daytime, our prime time is strong and getting stronger, so now we can focus on” turning around late night, he says. “Obviously, this is a trend that has to be reversed or flattened out.”

Letterman’s reps (Letterman himself was unavailable for comment) point out some factors he can’t control: There’s a mismatch between CBS’ prime-time audience (it’s older, with an average age of 52) and the average “Late Show” viewer (43). Letterman’s lead-in--the late local news--is relatively weak on many CBS affiliates; “Late Show” beats Leno in the few cities (such as New Orleans, Kansas City, Houston) where the CBS station has the leading newscast.

“The frustration is, we feel misplaced,” says Rob Burnett, “Late Show” executive producer. “It’s clear that the people watching the network [in prime time] are not the people flowing into the ‘Late Show,’ ” or Craig Kilborn’s talk show at 12:35 a.m. “The people [CBS] is promoting our show to will not watch it.”

Young-Adult Audience

Off About Two-Thirds

Indeed, Letterman’s support has all but collapsed among younger viewers, whom advertisers covet most. In five years, he’s lost about two-thirds of his young-adult (18 to 34) audience, according to Nielsen. “Late Show’s” ratings among these viewers were so dismal last season that Conan O’Brien, airing an hour later on NBC, tied Letterman in this age segment. CBS’ brass blame rival stations that air syndicated reruns of “Frasier,” “Friends” and “Seinfeld”--shows with strong appeal for young viewers--during Letterman’s time slot.

Of course, there’s an alternative explanation, which those close to Letterman flatly reject: Leno puts on a better show.

“Early on, Jay didn’t have his groove, he was uncomfortable, and Dave was killing him,” says Marc Berman, a New York media consultant and former “Tonight Show” researcher. “Then NBC started tinkering with it. They changed the set. They changed the format around, the mood of the show. It was more natural for Jay, and the audience responded.”

Letterman’s audience began to decline, Berman says, around the time of his widely panned hosting of the Academy Awards. Now, CBS “can’t really take the show and make it a different show. Letterman is who he is. To make him something that he is not would really make people tune out. The ball is in Leno’s court, and I think it will be there for years.”

Don Ohlmeyer, the former NBC executive responsible for the changes in Leno’s show, says the ratings are “a direct result of Jay Leno being able to run the marathon better than anyone. The public was watching Jay, it shifted to Dave, and then it gradually came back to Jay. It’s not a rejection of Letterman so much as it’s a reflection that Jay puts on a better, funnier show, one that seems more current and is more in line with what people are doing and thinking at 11:30 at night.”

In a late-night talk career covering some 17 years, Letterman ranks among television’s most enduring and gifted performers. His late-night shows on NBC and CBS not only redefined the traditional talk genre, they defined an entire style of humor--self-deprecating, sarcastic, ironic, skewed.

Letterman’s shows have introduced idiosyncratic pieces of “found” humor. He (or guests) tossed objects off tall buildings just to watch them go splat; he regularly sends cameras onto the streets surrounding his Manhattan studio just to bump into something funny; he uses street characters and stagehands as ironic performers. His signature routines--the Top 10 List, Stupid Pet/Human Tricks, etc.--have become genuine pop culture hallmarks.

Although Letterman just re-upped for three years on CBS, “Late Show” producer Burnett isn’t sure what lies beyond that. “That’s a difficult question for anyone to answer,” he says. “ . . . He’s done this for a long time. He enjoys it, to some extent. There are some things he finds less enjoyable. It’s a personal decision and he hasn’t made it.”