David Letterman had hosted ‘Late Night with David Letterman’ for more than a decade following
Johnny Carson’s ‘Tonight Show’ and when Carson retired there were those, including Dave, who had assumed that when the king retired Prince David would inherit the throne. Unfortunately, those people did not include the NBC programming bosses, who gave ‘The Tonight Show’ to Jay Leno, the show’s regular guest host. Snubbed, Letterman jumped at CBS’ offer of $42 million to appear on CBS opposite Leno’s ‘Tonight Show’ when his contract with NBC ran out in 1993. NBC did not take kindly to Dave’s defection. For a time it even threatened legal action if he attempted to use comic bits like “Stupid Pet Tricks” and the “Top 10 List” on another network because, according to them, having been developed while he was on NBC, those bits remained the “intellectual property” of NBC. Dave laughed at their threats and used them anyway.
‘Late Show with David Letterman’ looked pretty much like the ‘Late Night’ show Dave had done on NBC, with a few changes. The Ed Sullivan Theater, where it was housed (the same theater used for the long-running variety show that left eh air in 1971), was considerably larger than his old studio at NBC and had room for a much larger audience. Paul Shaffer’s band, re-christened the CBS Orchestra, had a few more players than the NBC version and Dave dressed a little more conservatively. Bumbling Calvert DeForest still showed up once in a while (by the late 1990s only once or twice a year until his last appearance in 2002), but as himself, not using his Larry “Bud” Melamn alias from NBC days. Another occasional character was Leonard Tepper as the bald guy who did stupid things. Isolated as it was from the other CBS facilities, Dave couldn’t wander into other shows in progress as he had at NBC. He did, however, take cameras into a number of the small stores in a new “Meet Our Neighbors” segment and made minor celebrities out of novelty store clerks Sirajul Islam and Mujibar Rahman and deli owner Rupert Jee. In February 1994 he even sent his mother, Dorothy, to Lillehammer, Norway, as the “Late Show’ special correspondent to the Winter Olympics, which were being covered by CBS and that summer he sent Sirajul and Jujibar across the country on a promotional tour for ‘Late Show’. Since the neighborhood did not have as much traffic as his NBC location, he frequently got the local police to close a side street so he could use it for everything from a tennis court, to a human cannonball, to a test of the power of a New York City fire hose.
When ‘Late Show’ premiered there was only one television market in which it was not carried – Sioux City, Iowa. Dave made a running joke of the fact, naming Sioux City the “Home Office” of the ‘Late Show’ Top 10 List. The people of Sioux City, in response, put a sign on the old vacated city hall proclaiming it the official ‘Late Show’ “Home Office”. One year after the show’s premiere, KMEG-TV, the CBS affiliate in Sioux City, in response to local complaints and in recognition of the fact that Letterman had had higher ratings than Leno for every single week of the past year, relented and started carrying the show. As far as Dave was concerned, however, it was still the “Home Office”. Although there were occasional references to other cities being the “Home Office”, it was officially moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in June 1995 and to Wahoo, Nebraska in May 1996.
Dave, who regularly made fun of his new employers at CBS, added a few new features to keep the show fresh – “Dave Talks to Kids”, “Stupid Human Tricks” and “The CBS Mailbag” among them – but in 1995 the glow started to fade. Ratings slipped somewhat and by the end of the year Letterman was running second to Leno’s ‘Tonight Show’.
(8.50) 
