Late Night’s List Is Shorter Than Ever

Though they are archrivals in the race for ratings supremacy, David Letterman and Jay Leno have effectively joined forces in one cause: Keeping the late-night field clear of an emerging talent who might someday replace them.

The jockeying for Letterman’s services, in fact, underscores not only the paucity of candidates perceived to be ready to front a late-night show but also the iron grip with which Letterman and Leno have held onto their late-night thrones in the last decade.

“This used to be a great forum for young comics to get national prominence,” complained one prominent talent manager, speaking on condition of anonymity lest he alienate either “The Tonight Show” or “The Late Show.” “And these two hosts almost made a conscious effort to eliminate that.”

The manager noted that both shows had improved talent relations of late.

But the comparatively gentle, nurturing era in which Johnny Carson was king of late night and broke in comics on “The Tonight Show”--introducing them to audiences through repeat visits to his stage and allowing a few to be guest hosts--has long since given way to the highly competitive Leno versus Letterman, either-or years.

It’s an all-consuming and personal ratings battle that doesn’t allow any other comedic voice to be heard.

Granted, Carson could afford to be magnanimous; he didn’t, for the most part, have competition. Leno versus Letterman, on the other hand, is all about competition. Leno consistently wins, much to the consternation of Letterman, whose ego evidently can’t abide simply being the more critically admired of the two.

His people (it is never Letterman himself) carp that “The Late Show” loses to “The Tonight Show” in large part because CBS’ prime time and late local-news audiences are weaker than NBC’s, an argument that would seem to belie the average American’s ability to point a remote control at the TV and press a button.

Regardless, Leno and Letterman have redrawn the politics of late night, a side effect of their talent and drive, not to mention the profits generated by each of their shows. Neither has a guest host, opting to air reruns when they go on vacation.

When Letterman underwent quintuple bypass heart surgery in January 2000, elaborate discussions about who would fill in eventually gave way to a tiny concession on “The Late Show’s” part: For a few weeks, quasi-guest hosts reminisced about past appearances. Then Regis Philbin did a night, and so did Bill Cosby. But the point was well taken: Letterman is bigger than the show itself.

ABC’s offer to “The Late Show” host marks the first seismic shift in late-night since 1991, when it was announced that Leno would succeed Carson on “The Tonight Show” and Letterman, deprived of his dream job, eventually retrenched at CBS. That 10 years have passed since then signals the glacial pace at which the landscape changes in late night, where two men, now both in their 50s, don’t figure to give way to successors in the near future.

At the same time, networks are so focused on short-term gains that talent development has practically ceased, observers say. Thus, Disney-owned ABC, evidently having decided that it needs a more profitable product than “Nightline” at 11:30 p.m., seized on a quick casting fix when the opportunity to enter the Letterman talks arose.

Late-night entertainment is a key potential profit center for the networks because the successful shows draw a heavy concentration of men ages 18 to 49, an elusive demographic that advertisers labor to reach. In addition, the attrition of prime-time ratings has increased the emphasis on developing late-night franchises.

Fox has been searching for a late-night show for years, knowing that it can get a jump on the competition by starting a program at 11 p.m. A recent play for Conan O’Brien, host of the 12:30 a.m. “Late Night with Conan O’Brien,” ended when O’Brien extended his contract at NBC through 2005.

For that matter, one could argue that with the exception of Arsenio Hall’s late-’80s insurrection, most have failed in late night, from Dennis Miller to Magic Johnson. It is not a job, in other words, that is as easy as it might look.

Longtime talent manager Bernie Brillstein, who shepherded the careers of everyone from John Belushi to Martin Short, articulated several familiar talking points in the comedy world that resonate in the bidding frenzy for Letterman: The death of “The Tonight Show” as a classy breeding ground of young talent; the attendant rise of the comedian-as-multimillion-dollar sitcom star; and the explosion of cable channels, which dilutes the creative gene pool and causes a clutter of talk shows and talking heads.

Before now, ABC has done little in the way of developing for late night, even as “Politically Incorrect With Bill Maher’s” stock has dropped internally. “PI,” which airs at midnight, after “Nightline,” hasn’t even been a part of the public debate, further evidence--if any were needed--that the show won’t be renewed at the end of the year.

Andrea Wong, the network’s senior vice president of alternative series and specials, declined to be interviewed, as did Maher.

Also not speaking is Jon Stewart, who many believe is best positioned to jump into the late-night waters thanks to his topical satire-talk show “The Daily Show,” which airs on cable’s Comedy Central, a cable network part-owned by Viacom, owner of CBS.

Stewart, who hosted “Saturday Night Live” over the weekend, joked during his monologue that he would take whatever network role offered him, including NBC weatherman Willard Scott’s job of “waving at old people.”

Stewart’s “Daily Show” draws fewer than 1 million viewers at 11 nightly, but a wave of positive press has recast him as a kind of matinee idol of late-night comedy, with the accessibility of Leno and the cynicism of Letterman but without the more objectionable qualities of each.

Several sources said Stewart reveres Letterman and would be reluctant to take him on as a competitor, and they noted that he is signed at Comedy Central through January 2003. Chris Rock, another proven commodity via his run as host of HBO’s “The Chris Rock Show,” is said by his representatives to be preoccupied with his film career, both as star and director.

That leaves Craig Kilborn, the man chosen by Letterman’s production company, Worldwide Pants, to succeed Tom Snyder as host of CBS’ “The Late Late Show.” But although Kilborn has improved the network’s performance among young men, he has done little in his three years on the air to convince executives that he’s ready for a higher-profile time slot.

In today’s era of vertically integrated media conglomerates, executives talk of using cable channels as “labs” to develop late-night personalities for the broadcast networks. In this way, presumably, a comedian named Zach Galifianakis, host of VH1’s new late-night talk show “Late World with Zach,” could someday become a late-night personality for CBS, as both are owned by Viacom.

More to the point, however, will VH1 exhibit the patience with Galifianakis needed to develop him, assuming he deserves the chance? Or is the trial-by-fire that O’Brien survived at NBC, where he lived on 13-week contracts in his initial months on the air before the network made a long-term commitment, the exception that proves the rule?

“The question is, 10 years from now, or 15 years from now, who’s going to be in your living room every night? And how are they going to work their way in?” said Doug Herzog, president at USA Cable Networks, who, before a stint running Fox, launched “The Daily Show” at Comedy Central.

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“These guys are like pillars,” Herzog said admiringly of Leno and Letterman. And pillars, unfortunately, don’t grow on trees.