THE DAWN OF A DULL NEW DAVE
Letterman is back and he’s older, wiser and a lot more depressing, writes
It’s been 969 days since David Letterman retired from network television, but his new show on Netflix felt even longer.
On Friday, as the weather in Toronto churned through multiple seasons in one day, Letterman returned to the cultural radar — a little older, a little wiser and a lot more depressing. If you watch expecting to see a topical monologue, gonzo antics and madcap interviews, prepare to be disappointed.
This new Letterman isn’t here to amuse you.
This new Letterman is here to bring you down.
The first episode begins in his cluttered office. Letterman is slumped behind his desk. His spectacles are pushed up on his forehead. Since we last saw him on CBS in the spring of 2015, he’s joined an anti-Gillette cult. Between the dense birch woodland covering his face and his despondent mumbling, Letterman looks and sounds like a fugitive mall Santa in dire need of a Prozac milkshake.
The show is called My Next Guest Needs No Introduction With David Letterman. And in the first episode, this guest is former U.S. president Barack Obama. What Obama does need is a livelier atmosphere and a sparring partner who can get him to deviate from responses that sound scripted.
Given the current state of political affairs south of the border — I’m scared to turn on CNN in case my kids hear and start repeating the word “s---hole” — you’d think Obama might have some insights into the chaos. You’d think he might have some thoughts about Planet Earth in the Age of Trump.
But if he does, we never hear it, mostly because Letterman is not conducting an interview so much as leading a love-in.
He’s not quizzing a former world leader. He’s fawning over a friend. When Obama speaks, Letterman looks at him the way my wife has never looked at me. When Obama cracks a joke — and 99 per cent of the punchlines here come from the guest, which is always a bad sign — Letterman cranks back his head and laughs uproariously.
Which would be fine if they were chitchatting privately in a restaurant. But on stage and for public consumption by way of streaming, Letterman’s deep admiration for Obama is like paint thinner. It strips away the qualities — irreverence, absurdity, caustic wit, biting humour — that made Letterman the dark prince of late night and the greatest influence on today’s practitioners.
Letterman spent more than three decades on network television with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. On Netflix, after one very long hour, that twinkle is now forlorn dew. He doesn’t need a new show. He needs a hug. He needs a security blanket.
He’s clearly not happy with the state of America. Fine. That’s a common feeling. But instead of taking a sardonic blowtorch to perceived outrages — as today’s latenight practitioners do on a nightly basis — Letterman sounds morose and defeated.
This is a man out of gas and with no map to get home. So what we end up with in Episode 1 is a meandering walk down memory lane.
We see vacation photos from both men. We hear about life after retirement from both men. Obama talks about his “dad moves” on the dance floor and the emotional torments of watching a child go off to college: “It was like open-heart surgery.”
And in between these sweet but sleep-inducing observations that we’ve heard before, he offers vague generalities: “One of the biggest challenges we have to our democracy is the degree to which we don’t share a common baseline of facts.”
Yes. Another challenge is in understanding what makes for good viewing.
It’s 2018. But Letterman’s new show feels like it was discovered inside a time capsule. There was a lengthy discussion about Obama’s Dreams from My Father, a book published in 1995. There was Letterman joking, more than once, that he was just glad Obama was in the Oval Office.
The crowd applauded. But Obama looked at Letterman with a side-eye smirk, like he wanted to say, “Man, it’s time to move on. Let’s talk about something else.”
At one point, tellingly, Obama takes controls and starts asking the questions: “How did you spend your time right after your last show? Did you take a deliberate break with the wife and son? Did you just brood in the dark somewhere?”
The irony is that last jab is the kind of thing Letterman might have asked a guest back in his heyday.
But those days are over, at least based on the first episode of this six-part odyssey into the painfully lame.
“Without a question of a doubt,” says Letterman, dewing up again while closing the show. “You are the first president I truly and fully respect.”
Then they embraced and everyone went home. vmenon@thestar.ca