Rumor had it that Leno faced a quick hook unless his ratings improved. They did-up 12 percent in the past three months. And Leno inherited far more stations at NBC than Letterman would at CBS: nearly 40 percent of that network’s affiliates have other commitments for their late-night slots. Letterman could also confront some age resistance. The audience at 11:30 runs older than at 12:30, and CBS’s is older than NBC’s. Letterman’s acerbic, hipper-than-thou shtik might not play as well. “The guy has a youngish cult following,” says Joel M. Segal, an executive vice president at the McCann-Erickson ad agency. “Unless he changes the program’s tenor, his upside at CBS is limited.”
The 12:30 audience is also smaller, which means Letterman needs more than his old cult to compete in an earlier slot. He must lure some of Leno’s boomers into defecting as well as break his own fans’ habit of turning to NBC. “He’ll do that,” predicts Paul Schulman, a major buyer of network ad time. “The young don’t watch networks, they watch shows-and they’ll seek Letterman out. Eventually, he’ll start beating everything in late night.”
That, however, may depend on whether Letterman continues to do what he does best. Perhaps TV’s angriest funny man, he thrives on publicly ridiculing his network bosses. How ticked off can even Dave be at people paying him $16 million per? CBS is also offering him an unusual perk: the right to produce a “late fringe” program at 12:30 after his own show. Look for something beyond the fringe, advises a letterman associate. Like, uh, “The Paul Shaffer Hour”? “Just expect lots of music,” says the source.
Everyone presumes that NBC has Dana Carvey waiting in the wings if Letterman bolts. But, says an NBC executive, “that’s a long way from a lock.” For openers, Carvey is balking. He’d rather do a prime-time series and continue to make movies. In fact, when Letterman’s contract with NBC expires next June, Carvey will be off shooting a film version of his “Hans and Franz” sketch. He may also realize that while he can impersonate a planeload of types, a talk-show host is not necessarily one of them. Most depressing evidence: Carvey’s host stint at the MTV Awards, which laid a giant egg. NBC, some speculate, is already lining up a backup to Letterman’s backup.
A Letterman leap to 11:30 might not hurt Leno as much as it does Arsenio Hall, whose numbers have been galloping south. (They plunged 20 percent in the past year.) Letterman may well siphon off some of Hall’s postadolescent viewers. The real killer, however, could be Chevy Chase. His late-night talkfest-Chase calls it “an exact copy” of Letterman’s “without the gap between the teeth”-arrives on the Fox network next fall. Many of the stations that carry Arsenio are Fox affiliates. Presumably, they’ll switch to Chevy, farther reducing the crowd at Arsenio’s party.
There’s one more contender who’s been comparatively overlooked. Home Box Office just awarded a late-night niche to its much-traveled “The Larry Sanders Show,” a dead-on skewering of the talk-show genre starring Garry Shandling. He’s the other sorehead who got passed over for Johnny’s job.
