With no real explanation beyond that he wants to take some nights off, David Letterman decided to do four shows this past week instead of five. Usually, he does five, taping two shows on Thursday so he can have Friday off. This week, Tom Arnold did the Friday night show.
This has prompted speculation — among Letterman fans on the Internet and elsewhere — that Dave is somehow packing it in, giving up, whatever. There's no real evidence for that but the assumption goes something like this: Letterman and his people have long complained that they'd be more competitive with Leno if CBS would give them more promotion and better lead-ins. Now, they have as much promotion as they could ever expect, and CBS's prime-time ratings are substantially up…and not only is Leno as far ahead as ever but Nightline is even up. So the presumption, fueled somewhat by his recent on-air performance, is that Dave's disheartened. A more prosaic analysis might be that the five-a-week grind is wearing him down, and that he feels he and the show will be better off if he works a bit less.
That would not be an aberrant viewpoint. Very few TV hosts in history have ever felt they could maintain a five show work week. The politics of the Leno-Letterman face-off, along with Leno's own personal mania for hard work, seemed to dictate that both men perform at that pace. In ten years, Jay has never had a guest host (apart from the one recent night when he swapped jobs with Katie Couric) and Dave has had them only while in the hospital or recuperating. But guest hosts are more the norm than not for talk shows: Steve Allen and Jack Paar both took nights off on a regular basis. Johnny Carson sometimes was so absent from The Tonight Show that it almost became a joke. Once, when the Friars roasted Mr.Carson, Groucho Marx got up to the podium and said…
You know, I've tried to watch Johnny. I've tuned in three times. One time, Jerry Lewis was the host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The next time, Harry Belafonte was the host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The third time, I was the host of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. I've never known Johnny Carson to host The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. We're honoring a man who doesn't show up for work.
Carson somewhat abated such jokes by making his absences more predictable, and by solving marital problems that had apparently necessitated some of them. Eventually, it became standard that someone else would guest host on Mondays, a Carson rerun would be offered on Tuesday,and Johnny would take X weeks per year off altogether. (The Tuesday rerun was sometimes a new show during Sweeps Weeks.) If Letterman decides to go that route, he's going to have to allow guest hosts who have a fighting chance.
Tom Arnold was a disaster — and I say that as someone who inexplicably enjoys Tom Arnold, at least in the guest chair. But the show was awful, falling easily to the level presumed by Arnold's self-deprecating jokes. It may not have been his fault. He seemed to have a sore throat, and was facing a studio audience that wrote away months ago for tickets, and probably planned their vacations, expecting to see Dave. He also may not have had sufficient support or time to prepare. All of this is reflected in the overnight ratings. Jay had a 5.2, Nightline had a 4.2 and The Late Show guest-hosted by Tom Arnold had a 2.8. That's about as bad as it could be. You or I could go out there and do hand shadows for an hour and get a 2.8.
Guest hosting is hard. You're working in someone else's arena with some (not all) of their equipment, working with people who know you're a temp. The writers, for instance, are going to save the best material for the star. Everyone on the staff knows that if the show bombs, the guest host will get 100% of the blame. I mean, the regular star isn't going to come in tomorrow and start firing people because the show wasn't just as good with the guest host.
The folks who've succeeded in guest-hosting have not been thrown into the spot in which Tom Arnold found himself last night. Joan Rivers did pretty well sitting-in for Johnny, at least for a while, and Jay Leno did as well as you could do. Both were "permanent" guest hosts who could plan well ahead, hire their own writers and get involved in the advance booking of guests. Both also were coming back again, so the staff had a little more incentive to do right by them. The guest hosts who did well for Johnny before them, functioning on a "non-permanent" basis, were those like Bill Cosby and Bob Newhart who walked in the door with decades of prepared material and enough importance that they almost equalled Johnny's personal star power. (Dave had Cosby guest-host for him once a few months ago, but it wasn't Cos at his best.)
Working less might be a good idea for Letterman. (An even better idea might be to try some actual comedy bits, rather than to just screw around with Rupert, the staff and pointless games.) But if he's going to bring in guest hosts, he's going to have to give those nights a fighting chance — by booking people who have a shot at being good. Even if it may mean auditioning for his own replacement.