The real king of late night

David Letterman, his face aglow in wild-eyed resilience, refuses to be defeated. He’s the Rocky of the late-night circuit: sure he comes in second in anything related to television viewers, but America cheers his uncompromising style, not his points/share.

And except for ratings, nothing else can defeat him: Not heart surgery, would-be kidnappers, fatherhood, a cigar-chomping (and cursing) Madonna, a long-running feud with Oprah and definitely not a strike that is likely to cost the movie and television industry more than $1 billion dollars — if it ends soon. Here we are less than a month into 2008 and already Time magazine has my nomination for its famous Person of the Year issue.

Yes, Dave and his production company, Worldwide Pants, made a backdoor deal with the Writer’s Guild of America to return to the air with writers and without crossing picket lines. Before that he paid his non-striking staff’s paychecks with his own money so they wouldn’t get canned. These moves proved to be golden decisions in the entertainment world, and some were saying that Letterman’s deal could start a domino effect that could end the strike completely. (That didn’t quite happen, though the WGA-Letterman deal did help the strike.) But the strike drama is only half the story. The other half is Letterman’s actual return to television, a return marked with an uncompromising burst of energy. And a beard.

It was grey and looked quite scratchy, and Dave had it shaved off on live TV later, but the beard’s brief appearance, a minor footnote to the vast span of Dave’s colorful career, will serve as a marker for what appears to be great things to come. Consider: The Late Show’s guests have been fantastic (Robin Williams, Tom Hanks and Howard Stern were primo interviews); the writers are using their positions to influence, on-air mind you, a strike negotiation; and Dave, guilty as usual, leads the crew along for a wild system-bucking ride. Leno may be the king of late night television, but he’ll never keep up to his long-time rival, Letterman, who wins style points for integrity, his endearing pliability in his field of entertainment and, what appears to be, a living breathing personality behind that freshly-shaven chin.

The guy seems three dimensional. Not just his show, but Letterman himself, right down to his soul. So far he’s the best thing to happen to entertainment in this new year.