America Needs ‘The Late Show with David Letterman’ on Streaming

The TV landscape is crowded with late night talk shows. With the rise of streaming and clip sharing, bits of late night entertainment have stretched out to become part of our morning routines or afternoon distractions. And with a dozen or more of these shows on in primetime (Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, James Corden, Stephen Colbert) and on cable (Conan O’Brien, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee) and on premium cable (John Oliver) and on streaming services (Sarah Silverman, the upcoming Hasan Minhaj and Norm MacDonald ones), the once exclusive club has opened its doors (although it’s still predominantly white, male, and skewed towards J-names).

The late night landscape looked completely different 25 years ago, and you can trace today’s talk-splosion back to a short fuse lit on this day in 1993. That’s because on this day, on August 30, 1993, CBS launched The Late Show with David Letterman. The show’s contentious creation followed David Letterman’s public falling out with NBC after they handed the keys to the Tonight Show kingdom to Jay Leno instead of Letterman, the guy everyone assumed was Johnny Carson’s heir. Letterman’s initial success on CBS and his perseverance when Leno took back the lead proved that NBC didn’t have a monopoly on desk-and-chair-based chatter. Comedy Central launched The Daily Show in 1996, and ABC jumped in a decade later with Jimmy Kimmel Live!

Given how these nightly comedy shows have become a vital part of our lives again, providing context and comfort after stressful days, how do we celebrate this historic moment? This is the problem: you can’t stream The Late Show with David Letterman anywhere outside of endless low quality YouTube videos. This is my plea: CBS All Access needs to add The Late Show archives to its service, pronto.

Think about it like this: streaming services like to tout how much content they’re guaranteeing subscribers. The more hours of television, the more bang people think they’re getting for their monthly buck. The Late Show, which ran from 1993 until 2015, aired 4,263 episodes. That’s almost four solid months of bingeing, back-to-back with zero sleep (the way late night comedy was meant to be consumed)!

I admit that adding the Late Show archives might not appeal to the average CBS All Access subscriber just looking for access to Star Trek: Discovery or every episode of Family Ties. Currently, the service keeps just the most recent few weeks of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in rotation. I get that, as the news cycle moves so fast nowadays that I can’t imagine anyone needing to hear Colbert’s monologue jokes about the Yanny/Laurel debate right now. And if they do, that’s on YouTube.

But the Late Show archives would serve a drastically different function than just keeping every episode of Colbert’s tenure in rotation. Once a late night talk show episode gets around 10 years old, it suddenly becomes a time capsule or, more personally, a diary entry. Seeing these old episodes with jokes about forgotten scandals and young(er) celebrities promoting films that have become classics or forgotten (or somewhere in between) can spark all sorts of memories.

Where were you when Madonna called David Letterman a “sick fuck” on national TV?

Or when a 20-year-old Drew Barrymore, uh, did this on national TV?

Or when a 34-year-old Joaquin Phoenix did whatever this was on national TV?

Or when Dave came back to work after having serious heart surgery?

Or when an actual sex scandal and extortion plot turned The Late Show into a sobering, very un-fun look into the private life of a man that spent decades very much not talking about his private life?

(I definitely know where I was: watching from the studio as a Late Show page–full disclosure)

These are all moments that became touchstones of the mostly pre-Internet era, moments that we gabbed and/or groaned about in unison. While Leno was winning ratings with The Dancing Itos (wow the ’90s were strange), Letterman was creating pop culture moments that begged to be discussed and dissected in the decades before YouTube.

I know that adding the Late Show archives would make CBS All Access really desirable for hardcore comedy fans and TV historians. Maybe this sounds too lofty, but I also think CBS All Access would be doing a public good by making The Late Show archives accessible. Yeah, a public good! That’s because those episodes are very much a browser history of what we once deemed important enough or scandalous enough to joke about. That kinda thing helps with perspective; when you’re in the day-to-day muck of a year like 2018, it gets real easy to think it can’t get any worse. It actually might help to take a trip back in time and compare the news of today to that of yesterday, to see how little things have really changed (and to also highlight all the horrifying ways they unquestionably have changed).

But more so than acting as video history book for modern America, the Late Show archives would just be a really funny get. Don’t you just want to be able to watch Dave work a Taco Bell drive through and not search through a bunch of dubiously dubbed YouTube vids?

Ugh, and don’t even get me started on the playlist CBS All Access could put together of every single one of Darlene Love’s tear-jerking renditions of “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home)”.

Please, CBS All Access, do whatever it takes to get these classic pop culture moments back in rotation. The Late Show changed television 25 years ago, and we gotta celebrate it.

….

Okay–and sure, yes, I guess I have a personal stake in all this too, because I did appear on the show a few times when I was an intern in 2006.

People need to see my performances in HD.