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Trivia / The Late Show with David Letterman

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  • Banned Episode: Notoriously, Letterman initially refused to air Bill Hicks's 1993 stand-up set on the show. He finally aired the cut segment on a 2009 episode (complete with Hicks's mother as guest), and wondered why he had a problem with it in the first place.
  • Channel Hop: Pissed that NBC execs picked Jay Leno over him to host The Tonight Show, Letterman took his show to CBS, which became The Late Show.
  • Colbert Bump:
    • Inverted when Jay Leno permanently took the lead over Letterman in the ratings after his 1995 interview with prostitute-solicitor Hugh Grant. This came in the wake of Letterman's disastrous stint as host of the Academy Awards that year, where his style of humor clashed horribly with the tone of that event.
    • Many musical performers got their first mainstream exposure on Letterman's shows, with R.E.M. and Hootie & the Blowfish probably being the ones who got the biggest boosts from their appearances.
  • Executive Meddling: Pissed that NBC execs picked Jay Leno over him to host The Tonight Show, Letterman took his show to CBS, where he had to make a few changes for the 11:30 slot that seemed minor at first but ultimately ended his peak until NBC's Jay-vs-Conan meltdown in 2009. Carson himself never forgave NBC for picking Leno over Letterman, as he always thought that Letterman was the best choice to succeed him. As such, whenever Carson got an idea for a joke while in his retirement, he would send them to Letterman instead of Leno. And when Carson himself showed up on-air, the applause was deafening. Both men were clearly overwhelmed by it.
  • Keep Circulating the Tapes: After A&E aired repeats of Late Night, Letterman apparently felt that such repeats hurt the value of first-run episodes. Despite the fact that Letterman's stewardship of the Late Show is over, there are no current arrangements to have his episodes show up in repeats or on DVD. That didn't stop fans from posting episodes on YouTube, although those videos have been subject to takedown notices by Worldwide Pants since Dave started his own official channel.
  • Role-Ending Misdemeanor:
    • Bill Wendell, Letterman's long time announcer (having announced Letterman's entire Late Night run before crossing over with him to CBS in 1993), officially retired in 1995 and was replaced by Alan Kalter. Appearing on a podcast in 2018, former Late Show producer Robert Morton revealed that Wendell had actually been fired for habitually stealing bottled water intended for the production staff.
    • Tony Mendez, known to viewers as "the cue-card boy" and host of the Worldwide Pants-produced webcast The Tony Mendez Show, was fired in 2014 after he assaulted staff writer Bill Scheft during an argument.
    • Letterman's assistant Stephanie Birkitt started appearing on the show in 1996 and became a very frequent presence over the next decade, at one point even co-hosting the aforementioned Tony Mendez Show. In October of 2009 she was placed on leave of absence after it was revealed that a former lover of hers had tried to blackmail Letterman, with the related revelation that Letterman and Birkitt had been in a secret relationship. Birkitt had essentially stopped making appearances in 2008, and never appeared again after the scandal.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • As Bill Carter recounted in his book The Late Shift, after Letterman let it be known he was willing to leave NBC, he listened to pitches from CBS, ABC, Fox, and several First-Run Syndication offers, including Paramount and Disney. The syndicators were rejected early on. Letterman at one point leaned toward ABC, but the question of whether his show would air before or after Nightline led to an impasse (ABC also pursued Jay Leno around that time). Fox had already signed Chevy Chase to host a talk show and weren't too clear on what their plans for Letterman might be, so he ended up with CBS largely by default.
    • The Super Bowl commercial Dave made with Oprah and Jay Leno was planned to feature Conan O'Brien, but Conan's deal with NBC stipulated that he couldn't appear on television for several months after leaving The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien. More to the point (according to Bill Carter and Letterman himself), Conan didn't want to do the commercial.
    • There were discussions as Dave made the move to CBS whether or not the new Late Show with David Letterman would be based out of Los Angeles instead of New York. The week of shows he did at CBS Television City in 1994 was viewed by some as testing the waters for a possible relocation to California.
    • Two people rumored to make a surprise appearance on Dave's last show...Jay Leno and Andy Kaufman.note  Neither showed.note 

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