The Golden Age: The Late Night Shuffle, Or All You Need is Cash

“Any time there’s a big stink like this—and believe me, there hasn’t been a big stink like this in years — it’s money. Don’t kid yourselves. It’s all about money.”

These were just some of David Letterman’s bristling words on The Late Show a couple of weeks ago in the thick of the controversy surrounding NBC’s decision to move Jay Leno back to 11:30 and Conan O’Brien’s unwillingness to comply with that change. Dave was livid, as he has always been since NBC pulled almost the exact same trick on him, also involving Jay Leno, almost two decades ago, but this time under only the thinnest of veils. He finally had a reason to talk about it, and everything that he had left pent up for years under the forced diplomacy of television ratings about NBC, Jay Leno, and their betrayal of him, came out night after night in a torrent of thorny monologues and dead serious jokes.

And Dave was right. It is all about money, and we kid ourselves to think that it isn’t. No matter how many “I’m with Coco” rallies were held, no matter how much internet support Conan garnered behind him, at the bottom of it all, the dispute was still only ever going to be about contracts. To watch the NBC late night shuffle is to watch not solely a feud between competing comedy types, but the business practices of NBC C.E.O. Jeff Zucker—a businessman running a business, albeit incompetently. It’s true that one of the most tired cliches an artist can face is the cold, steady stare of a business person who could give two shits about your art beyond its profit margin. It’s also true that profitable art cannot survive without profit movers.

Yet there is still a real reason why Dave was angry, and why Conan chose to leave the show he had waited his whole career to inherit, and that is the integrity of what they do. This is also where music comes in. Over the course of their parallel careers at CBS and NBC, Dave and Conan have been enthusiastic supporters of new music and up-and-coming artists. To put it frankly, they have taste, both in comedy and in general arts and entertainment, and that taste has always been decidedly youthful.

Their appeal in this area is nowhere more apparent than in the music blogosphere, where 20 and 30 somethings claim their allegiance not by actually watching the shows, which subsist on an increasingly archaic viewership model, but on the type of artists the hosts choose to support and where video clips of them can be seen online. It was a big deal when Animal Collective played on Letterman. It was a big deal when Conan had Radiohead on Late Night for In Rainbows, even if it was via taped performance, just as it was a big deal when he gave them their first U.S. television appearance 15 years earlier. Dave’s reaction to a band’s performance on his show has become a rite of passage into an imagined world of elite musicians. Conan even got Grizzly Bear on The Tonight Show (something that never would have happened in the gee-wiz Jay Leno era).

Conan is gone now, though, for the time being, and we’re left with Jimmy Fallon to pick up the slack in music acts. He’s shown promise so far, mostly in his bookings, but it will probably still continue to be Dave who leads the vanguard. Still, Dave is getting older and more cantankerous, and really, it’s only about money, right? Right, but Conan gave a large chunk of his money away to his staff, and I take solace in his last choked up words on The Tonight Show, which you can find below, which he followed with a performance of “Freebird” with Will Ferrell, Ben Harper, Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top, Beck, and The Tonight Show band. Coco, I’m with you. Maybe it really isn’t all about the money after all.

“And all I ask is one thing. I’m asking this particularly of young people that watch. Please do not be cynical. I hate cynicism. For the record, it’s my least favorite quality. It doesn’t lead anywhere.  Nobody in life gets exactly what they thought they were going to get. But if you work really hard and you’re kind, amazing things will happen.”

- The Golden Age is a weekly column written by Erik Martz.