Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
When I was a teenager, I’d set the VCR every night to tape David Letterman. Late Night started at 1 AM where I lived, sometimes 1:30 AM, so staying up to watch the show—in a house where we had one TV—was beyond my reach. But as soon as I came home from school the next day, I’d sit in front of that TV with a big bowl of ice cream and soak up the comedy genius. Letterman shaped my sense of irony, which I refuse to release even though it’s only served me moderately well, as well as my disdain for celebrities, which I will grip tightly to my chest as my corpse gets wheeled into the crematorium. He spoke a secret language to me that was, by today’s standards, difficult to obtain.
Slowly, and then all at once, TV became instantly available, on multiple devices. No teenager ever has to record anything, except for videos of themselves reacting to other people’s videos. But I can’t imagine my teenage son even thinking of watching Letterman’s new show, My Next Guest, available now and forever on Netflix. Letterman releases one episode a month, a slow production pace even by the standards of someone who can do whatever the hell they want. Even though I didn’t start it until Letterman already had three in the bank, it still took me three whole months to watch the five episodes that he’s released to date. Letterman used to be a relief from the bullshit of school. Now he feels like homework.
The opening episode, featuring Barack Obama, was so mind-numbingly dull that I fell asleep on my living room floor in the middle. I woke up fifteen minutes later and asked my wife what I missed. “Nothing,” she said. While I miss the Obama years as much as any good bourgeois Democrat, he offers nothing but homilies, and Letterman does everything but remove his shoes and kiss his feet. Then, in an interstitial segment, Letterman walks across a bridge in Montgomery with Representative John Lewis. When we return to the Obama interview, Letterman remarks that when John Lewis was a teenager, he was protesting civil rights injustices. Letterman, on the other hand, was getting drunk on a cruise ship with his buddies from Indiana. He clearly feels bad about his misspent youth.
The show should be retitled Dave Letterman’s Cavalcade Of Liberal Guilt. He’s atoning for all his sins, and all of ours. Half of his George Clooney “interview” gets spent discussing Amal Clooney’s human-rights work, and a visit to Clooney’s boyhood home turns into a condescending and strange segment where Letterman goes driving with an Iraqi refugee. Suddenly, at this heavily-bearded stage in his career, Letterman feels like he must make up for a lifetime spent hosting Stupid Pet Tricks, reading Top 10 lists, flirting with Sarah Jessica Parker, and sucking on Jennifer Aniston’s hair. Instead, he talks to Malala about girls’ education in developing countries and lets everyone know that he thinks racism is bad.
The Jay-Z episode is particularly strange. Letterman reveals himself to be a crusty grandpa when it comes to hip-hop, which is as it should be, but then the interview goes completely into wackadoodle territory where Letterman and Jay-Z both allude to having had affairs and almost destroying their families. They talk about going through therapy, while never specifically mentioning any details about the situations. Their interview has a confessional feel, like a 12-stepper reluctantly admitting his deepest flaws to his sponsor. But it lacks specificity, so it doesn’t land. If you’re going to dish, then dish. Don’t be elliptical, man. Who was Becky With The Good Hair? Even more bizarrely, the scene then cuts to Rick Rubin’s recording studio in California, where a group of bearded white men are completely grooving out to a pretty female singer performing a love ballad with Willie Nelson’s son that was also written by Willie Nelson’s son. It’s an absolute carnival of objectification, but no one seems to grasp the irony.
Letterman also talks to Tina Fey, with whom he’s as clueless as King Lear on the heath, literally asking, his voice pained and befuddled, why he didn’t have more female writers on his old shows. Even though the answer is pretty obvious, he clearly doesn’t understand. Fey displays as much kindness and patience with the old horse as she can, but she can’t make him drink. As a bad Slate article might say, “unlike her character Liz Lemon, Fey no longer has to perform the exhausting emotional labor that’s been required of women in entertainment for so long.” Her answers leave Letterman scratching his face, wondering where the time has gone. Then he eats Greek chicken with Buddy Guy in Chicago.
One could also call the show Famous People Generalize About Parenting. Letterman, having no other common bond with which to relate to the rest of humanity, unsuccessfully tries to take a “kids these days” approach. His guests, already committed to the hour, play along. Fey goes to great pains to portray herself as Everymom, not the Lucille Ball combined with Carl Reiner mixed with Mel Brooks plus Carol Burnett of her generation. Meanwhile, Letterman has so much in common with Obama because they’re both dads. Also, George Clooney is a dad. Malala may not be a dad, but her dad is a dad, and Letterman has lunch with her dad and talks about being a dad with him. “What kind of a world are we leaving for our kids?” Letterman seems to ask. The Clooney twins, and Harry Letterman, I’m pretty much guessing, will be fine. Jay-Z is certainly a Blue Ivy dad, but at least he calls Letterman out on his bullshit, saying “you have a staff.”
The show only occasionally veers away from dutiful rich-guy piety and toward entertainment, like a cute taped segment where Malala takes Letterman on a tour of the Oxford bookstore, or where Fey tries to teach him how to do improv. For brief moments, the fog of guilt parts, and you can see a spark return to Letterman’s eyes. He’s being funny, naturally. The weight of the world lifts from his facial hair, and we can briefly watch.
Like all us liberals, David Letterman is sad about what this country has become. As far as I can recall, things got pretty dark during Letterman’s 1980s heyday as well, but he didn’t spend his life hand-wringing about Ronald Reagan. Now, though, he shoulders the blame for the Age Of Trump and we must all shoulder it with him. His new show acts as an endless Yom Kippur for the Democratic soul. We have sinned, we have transgressed, we have done perversely. Comedy, in David Letterman’s endgame eyes, means always having to say you’re sorry.
Neal Pollack is the author of ten bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction. His latest novel is the sci-fi satire Keep Mars Weird. He lives in Austin, Texas.
