Late Night’s Idle Chatter Yields to Uneasy Talk

Celebrities haven’t been speaking for the last two weeks, and without them we have had time to contemplate many important things.

Why is the U.S. so hated?

Why is it a hatred beyond all reason?

Does the hatred stem from flat-out mental illness?

This was David Letterman, grilling his guest, Bryant Gumbel, on “The Late Show With David Letterman” on Tuesday. When we last saw Gumbel, he was conducting a town meeting of contestants from “Survivor,” but “The Early Show” host, pressed into duty as an infotainer in this difficult time, persevered. The next night, Letterman listened as ABC News correspondent John Miller detailed his travels to a terrorist camp in Afghanistan run by Osama bin Laden.

Were we witnessing the dawn of a new era, when talk show guests discussed the world outside Hollywood’s studio gates and their own egos? These are desperate times, calling for desperate measures, and Letterman, Jay Leno, Craig Kilborn and Conan O’Brien, the four horsemen of late-night chat, were openly confronting the harsh reality this week that they had to to conduct meaningful conversations.

This partly explains why actors stayed away from their shows for much of the week. The hosts had no choice, however, and each took his turn that first night back seeming to apologize for doing a show in the first place. It was, each time, a startling sight, but Letterman, the patriarch, was first up and delivered the best hour of television. “If we are going to continue doing shows here in New York,” he said, “then I need to hear myself talk for a few minutes.”

What was required, evidently, was a few minutes of penance and gravitas, apparently unscripted, in which the hosts could communicate their remorse over the attacks and their reasons for returning to the frivolous world of late-night television. They didn’t want to come back, they all said to varying degrees, but they’d been told by the president of the United States and the mayor of New York (no one mentioned their networks, conveniently) to go back to work, so here they were. Work for them means coming up with 15 or 20 minutes of comedy material five nights a week and letting celebrities come onstage and sell their products and themselves, no strings attached.

And yet, celebrities rightly sensed that they couldn’t resume their normal functions--shameless plugging and self-idolatry. Instead, as bookings fell out, shows scrambled to find hard news personalities--Dan Rather, who broke down on “The Late Show,” Sen. John McCain on “The Tonight Show” (“We will prevail. We will prevail,” he assured the audience), “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Croft on “Late Night With Conan O’Brien” and Lawrence O’Donnell, a Senate aide-turned-TV writer-producer (“The West Wing”) on “The Late Late Show.”

By midweek, however, there were various signs that things were getting back to normal--signs, in other words, that it was safe not to watch these shows again.

On Wednesday night, Leno came out and did a monologue, offering one-liners about Dennis Rodman’s boat speeding and Luciano Pavarotti’s tax woes (“Again,” Leno said at one point, giving in to exposition, “we’re looking for silly things in the news.” He did this again Thursday night, stopping the monologue to say: “We’re just being silly, just being silly.”)

Leno’s guest Wednesday night was Arnold Schwarzenegger, who walked onstage carrying an American flag and then talked of how Americans had taken him in, back in 1968, when Schwarzenegger arrived in the U.S. from Austria as a young, impressionable immigrant bodybuilder. As it happens, the movie he would otherwise have been plugging, “Collateral Damage,” which has now been postponed, opens with the terrorist bombing of an American skyscraper. Fantasy or no, Schwarzenegger is one American celebrity willing to do his part.

Meanwhile, at 12:30, O’Brien spent the week insisting that he didn’t really know what he was doing, or at least that he wasn’t sure (over on CBS, Kilborn wasn’t having such a crisis of conscience). O’Brien came on the late-night scene eight years ago, fresh from the Harvard Lampoon and the writers’ room at “The Simpsons.” This is top-of-the-line ironist job training, but this week he seemed to be reaching for a part of his personality that doesn’t show up on the resume.

On Tuesday night, O’Brien urged his core college-aged audience “not to be cynical,” a somewhat odd request, particularly coming from someone whose wit has been appreciated by a demographic up after midnight.

But like “The Late Show,” “Late Night” is taped in New York, thus putting Letterman and O’Brien closer to the grief and unreality. Without smirking irony, what would O’Brien do? He would show a baby deadlifting a six-pack of beer, it turned out, and conduct a tortured interview with Carson Daly, the telegenic young host of MTV’s “TRL.” “This was our generation’s shot heard ‘round the world,” Daly said, mixing his metaphors a tad, but, hey--it’s been a trying two weeks.

It was clear by midweek that only Letterman had the credibility to channel what the nation was feeling, and that only Letterman had the chops to dance between sobriety and levity. In a way, it’s not a fair fight--he is older than Kilborn and O’Brien, and he is a broadcaster where Leno is a Populist comedian who gets visited, like Mr. Rogers after he changes into his tennies, by big people in the entertainment community.

For all the plaudits Letterman earned for expressing his sorrow Monday night, and for all the attention Rather-the-newsman drew for crying, the show’s true Letterman moment came later. After 40-some minutes of heavy stuff, out came Regis Philbin. “Revenge is best served cold,” Rather had said, but for Philbin life is a bowl, and it’s always filled with cherries. Philbin would be silly, and everyone could exhale, including Letterman. “So,” he asked Philbin, “how’d you meet Joey Bishop?”

The rest of the week, Letterman sat shiva for the nation by refusing to open with a monologue or even his theme music. Instead, the camera came up on a shot of the Ed Sullivan Theater, then faded to Letterman at his desk, sitting there with index cards of jokes and top 10 lists that he was going to read against his better judgment. The studio audience, which normally roars at everything Letterman utters as if at a pep rally, was muted. Some were reminded of the good old days, when Letterman did a quirky and intimate little NBC show and his comedy could breathe. It was morning in Dave-land again. He looked dazed and stricken, but then again he always does nowadays.

Ultimately, though, all the talk of returning to normality enabled late-night television to go back to its most crass commercial instincts with impunity. You want a return to normality? We’ll give you a return to normality: Pamela Anderson, Leno’s guest Friday.

“I think Letterman, Leno and Conan are perfectly sincere,” says Neal Gabler, a senior fellow of the Norman Lear Center at USC’s Annenberg School of Communication and the author of “Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality.”

“I think the programs themselves, as institutions, are being a little disingenuous .... Those programs could have stayed off the air for another month while the nation recovered. It’s self-serving to say, ‘Look, we’ve got to come back on to restore normalcy to the country, and this is the only way we can do it.’ ... To say, ‘We’ve got to return to normal’ when you’re essentially a profit-making venture, that’s a little odd, and a little unseemly in certain respects, given that we’re only eight days away from the tragedy.”

In a way, by insisting on their irrelevancy in the face of last week’s horrors, the late-night hosts were only stating what many who don’t watch them have felt for some time.

Before Sept. 11, these shows were irrelevant because they gave their air over to celebrities with everything to sell and nothing to say or because the edge--the sense of a surprise moment--had steadily eroded from the shows themselves. We watched them if we were up, but sleeping meant nothing more than missing out on a laugh, maybe two.

This week, the only late-night host who made waves was Bill Maher, who used his “Politically Incorrect” bully pulpit on Monday to say that the past lobbing of American cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away was cowardly, reacting to a guest who suggested that referring to the terrorists as cowards risked understating their resolve. Sears and Federal Express pulled their advertising from the show, and the media did stories. Maher, perhaps, proved his point: If a comment falls in the woods of late-night, it can still make a sound. What was different about Dave, Jay, Craig and Conan this week? Everything ... and nothing at all.