David Letterman is coming home.
“Late Night” host Seth Meyers announced on his Tuesday night program that Letterman, who hosted the NBC program from 1982 to 1993, will join him on air on Feb. 1 to celebrate the show’s 40th anniversary.
Though other comedians including Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Fallon hosted “Late Night” between Letterman and Meyers, Meyers told Letterman when he was a “Late Night” guest in 2018 that “If you hadn’t started, I wouldn’t be here.”
During that visit, Letterman brought Meyers a tick, he claimed he’d picked off his own body, and returned the compliment.
“Your show is nothing like my show,” he said. “My show was lumpy and viscus. Your show is crisp and smart and contemporary and, it’s just lovely.”
The one thing Letterman said Meyers should have done differently — which he told him from the start — is change the name of the program to “The Tomorrow Show.”
That was the name of the program when Tom Snyder hosted it in the same time slot, following “The Tonight Show,” then hosted by Johnny Carson.
Meyers said he kept the name “Late Night” because he wanted to be a part of the legacy Letterman helped establish.
Letterman left “Late Night,” and NBC, in 1993, to do the “Late Show with David Letterman” on CBS. He stayed there until 2015. After a three-year hiatus, the 74-year-old Indianapolis native launched “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction” on Netflix.
Meyers’ announcement was meet with cheers by an audience that was also told the musical guest on the anniversary show will be Counting Crows, which formed in 1991. When they played “The Late Show” in 1994, Letterman told his viewers that if they didn’t have a copy of the band’s new CD, there was something “wrong” with them.
“That is a show that would make college-aged Seth Meyers very happy,” Meyers, 48, said Tuesday.
———
