Couch Potato Report

As promised I checked out Letterman’s monologue tonight.  He did apologize to his staff, for causing an intrusion and disruption into their lives with his actions and what he said Thursday.  He didn’t however apologize outright to his wife on the air.  He touched on the subject and acknowledged he hurt her, and it’s up to him to fix it, and through some of his jokes admitted she’s pretty angry with him.

The more I thought about it though, I don’t have a problem that he didn’t apologize to his wife on the tube.  When you get past the public extortion plot, he’s dealing with perhaps marital indiscretions (if the affairs occurred while married), or at the very least cheating on his then girlfriend if it happened before he got married.  Which really, isn’t much better.  As he said, he has to fix it, and while an acknowledgement that he hurt his wife on air may be part of the healing process for both of them… it certainly is only one very small part of the fixing he has to do.  Most of which probably is better done privately.

It was also very interesting to watch how he handled his body language tonight when talking about it.   It obviously was well thought out, and it very well may have been vetted by his lawyer.  However, it didn’t seem as picture perfect as the story did Thursday.  He seemed to look down at his desk a lot as opposed to looking at the camera.  I interpreted what he was doing tonight to be much more about his feelings and thoughts and about the personal mess he found himself in.  Thursday was about getting the story out before the headlines, Thursday was show business.  Tonight, I think, may have been a little more personal.

Of course, what do I know.  If only we could get Lie To Me’s Dr. Cal Lightman to interpret the tapes.  Then we’d have some answers.

So I was futzing around on the computer after watching House tonight and ran into a report from Us Magazine that says David Letterman will apologize to his wife during his show tonight.  Letterman’s show was taped Friday, so this will be his first show back since Thursday night’s bombshell.

I don’t know why I’m interested in this, and honestly, I feel a little sleazy being interested in it.  But I think I’ll try to stay up and watch it.  It will be interesting to see how the audience reacts, and how slick/prepared vs. heartfelt Dave will come across.  Or will Dave come across as both?  I’ll post my reactions after the show tonight or tomorrow.  Please feel free to leave your comments and reactions to the show as well.

You can read the Us Magazine article here.

Here’s a quick preview of tonight’s show from CBS:

Last night on The Late Show With David Letterman, Dave, in a very understated way,  dropped a bombshell on his audience and TV viewers by admitting he has slept with female staffers on his TV show, and was the target of a two million dollar extortion plot hatched by a CBS staffer on 48 Hours.

Now we haven’t watched Dave in a while.  I’d say our family is probably a Conan family.  Although, living on East Coast Time by the time any of the late night shows hit the air, we’re heading upstairs, getting ready for bed and checking out the funny pics on icanhascheezburger.com.

So I wound up viewing the video on youtube here this morning.   Now,  I’ve never doubted Dave’s a pro.  He’s probably the best, most polished late night host out there.   Even Johnny Carson thought so.  But if there was any doubt about it, there wasn’t after last night.

Sitting at his desk he delivered a highly polished monologue detailing how he was being blackmailed, played up the “terrible, terrible stuff” the extortionist knew about him without revealing what it was right away,  told the audience how terrified it made him feel, talked about how he’s motivated by guilt, invoked his Lutheran upbringing, his dealings with the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, talked about the phony two million dollar check his lawyer gave the extortionist, and at the end revealed that the terrible, terrible stuff the extortionist was talking about was the Dave has slept with women who worked on his late night TV show.

It was a perfect monologue.  I just listened to it again as I was typing this post, and I can picture David Letterman, as “any man”, just sitting on a stool in a bar telling the story to his friends.  All of them leaning in a little bit to make sure they didn’t miss a thing.  The writing and the delivery of the story was a grand slam.

It’s the lack of details in the admission that I think is key to Dave selling us the story.  He played it up quite a bit throughout, making us wonder what did this guy find out about Dave?  Then reveals the accusation at the end:   Dave slept with women who worked on his show.  After all the hype, that’s the “terrible, terrible thing?”

Taken at face value, the statement “I slept with women who worked on the show”  is almost a yawn inducing revelation.   It’s probably happening at workplaces all across America to some degree.   And Letterman did a great job at blunting the statement by hyping it throughout the story to somewhat mute the emotions we’d have when he revealed what he did.  In addition, he played the Letterman nerd card, joking about how we’re all surprised that Dave actually has sex.  I’m sure there’s some neanderthal guys out there that can’t wait to fist bump Dave the next time they see him because he did sleep with female staffers.

His admission left a lot of questions unanswered, and the more that gets revealed about this story will make it interesting, and perhaps sordid.   Did this happen before he was married, when he was married?  Did his wife, who was his girlfriend for 23 years and a staffer on his show, know about these relations before he married to her?  What did Dave really reveal to the Grand Jury?  Will he be getting divorced?

I know one thing, a very similar story will end up one on of the Law and Order shows before the end of this TV season, and it will be “ripped from the headlines.”