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A little over a year has passed since David Letterman said goodbye to The Late Show, the CBS late night program now run by former Daily Show and Colbert Report star Stephen Colbert. So what’s the 69-year-old comedian been up to during his retirement? Just about everything you can imagine — surprising audiences at other people’s stand-up shows, growing a massive Late Show breakup beard, and stopping by ESPN’s SportsCenter to let everyone know he’s drunk. Aside from scheduled public outings and impromptu jokey cameos like these, however, Letterman hasn’t really given an official, “in-depth” interview since retiring from television. Or at least that’s what NBC’s saying while promoting his new interview with Tom Brokaw for Dateline NBC.
The interview, which airs Sunday, June 12 at 7 p.m. ET, delves into Letterman’s life (or at least as much as he’s willing to) post-retirement, but a one-minute clip posted by NBC reveals the former Late Show host’s thoughts on what CBS has done with the program:
“I’m happy for the guys, men and women… There should be more women. I don’t know why they didn’t give my show to a woman. That would have been fine.”
When Brokaw asked whether or not CBS asked Letterman about his possible replacements, he said no. It’s not the first time this subject has come up, but Letterman’s renewed insistence on the matter here pretty much sets it in stone.
As to whether or not he misses doing The Late Show, Letterman had more of a definitive answer for Brokaw’s prodding:
“You know, I don’t. It’s interesting. I thought for sure I would. The first day of Stephen’s show, when he went on the air, an energy left me and I felt like, ‘You know that’s not my problem anymore. And I’ve kind of felt that way ever since. I devoted so much time to the damage of other aspects of my life — a concentrated, fixated focusing on that — it’s good now to not have that. I couldn’t care less about late night television.”
Depending on who you ask, Colbert is either doing a passable, but not too successful job, or his own thing regardless of the higher ratings his competitors garner for their shared time slot. And as Letterman confesses, he thinks what Colbert’s team has done with the program is just fine. But why not a woman? Samantha Bee asked this question repeatedly throughout Full Frontal‘s earliest promotions, and considering the show’s success at TBS, it leaves one to wonder about what CBS’s precise strategy was.
(Via TV Line)
