The late night show

Letterman's iteration of the program ran until his retirement on May 20, Eastern and Pacific , in the Central and Mountain time zones. CBS had previously attempted late-night talk shows with The Merv Griffin Show — and The Pat Sajak Show — but neither were able to compete with NBC's The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and were cancelled; Griffin's for editorial disputes with the network he would go on to continue the show in syndication for 14 more years , and Sajak's for low ratings.

For most of the 20 years preceding Late Show , CBS's late night fare consisted of movies, re-runs, imported Canadian dramas and specialty programming packaged under the titles CBS Late Night and Crimetime After Primetime and broadcast to middling ratings, competing against The Tonight Show and, in its last years, the upstart success of a syndicated series, The Arsenio Hall Show , which began airing in According to their agreement, the show would spend a month in Hollywood at least once a year.

CBS purchased the Ed Sullivan Theater for four million dollars, spending "several million more" for renovation. Letterman renamed a few of his regular bits to avoid legal problems over trademark infringement NBC cited that what he did on Late Night was " intellectual property " of the network, a contention he disputed. Leno pulled ahead on July 10, , starting with a Hugh Grant interview, after Grant's much-publicized arrest for picking up an LA prostitute.

Despite CBS rising back to first place in prime time in the s, Letterman never fully recovered from the damage, and he remained behind Leno and successor Jimmy Fallon for the rest of his tenure, only briefly rising back to first place during Conan O'Brien's run as host of The Tonight Show.

The late night show movie

Announcer Bill Wendell left in , [ 6 ] with Alan Kalter taking his place for the remainder of Letterman's run as host. The plan was similar to CBS's pre-Letterman use of the slot for Crimetime After Primetime when police procedurals and mysteries aired in the slot in the earlys, and the late s CBS Late Night which featured a mixture of scripted programming.

CBS inaugurated the summer format with reruns of the final season of The Mentalist , a cancelled prime time police procedural, airing nightly from May 21 until June 5, The Late Late Show poked fun at the initial choice for its summer lead-in during several June episodes with a cold open sketch titled "Talking Mentalist", a parody of Talking Dead in which Corden, his bandleader Reggie Watts , and one of the show's scheduled guests discussed the episode that had just ended.

Stephen Colbert succeeded Letterman as host on September 8, , [ 15 ] having been signed to a five-year contract.

The late night show hosts

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