Dave Letterman has never been shy about letting TV network management know when they’re being idiots, assholes, or any other flavor of pinhead. (Indeed, at least part of the man’s mystique, as he himself would note, runs on his love of battling with and tweaking his various corporate overlords over the years.) So it’s not entirely shocking to hear Letterman go hard after CBS over its recent conduct vis a vis his successor Stephen Colbert, calling the decision to cancel Colbert’s Late Show last week both “gutless” and an act of “pure cowardice.”
Letterman was in conversation with his long-time friend and collaborator, Late Show executive producer Barbara Gaines, as well as My Next Guest Needs No Introduction executive producer Mary Barclay, when he launched enthusiastically into the topic. Laying out his own (slightly idiosyncratic) view of events—he remains convinced, against all evidence, Barclay’s protests, and in the service of comedy, that Skydance Media is run by twin brothers—Letterman says he doesn’t buy that CBS’s decision to tell Colbert his current season will be his last was financially motivated. “You’re telling me losing this kind of money happened yesterday?” he rhetorically asks, noting, with agreement from veteran producer Gaines, that there are plenty of ways late night shows can tighten budgets before going to the nuclear option. In Letterman’s view, the timing is just too obvious: Skydance (which just got FCC approval for its merger with Paramount, which is set to conclude early next month) didn’t want a repeat of what went down with Donald Trump’s CBS News lawsuit, and so pre-emptively got rid of Colbert before he could continue to deploy his “precise, quick, witty” satirical abilities on Trump’s hide.
Hilariously, Letterman actually sounds just a tad jealous of Colbert for being dropped into such a clear and obvious hero position, noting that he’s “a martyr” who’s basically had his position in the TV Hall Of Fame permanently set. (“I only wish this has happened to me,” Letterman says at one point, only half-sounding like he was joking. “This would have been so great for me.”) All told, it’s a withering takedown of the “bottom feeders” Letterman condemns at Skydance (delivering a classically Letterman “What the fuck is Skydance? Is it a discount airline?” in the process).
