David Letterman Claims That Jay Leno’s ‘Tonight Show’ Was More ‘Likable’ Than His ‘Late Show’

These days, late-night talk show hosts tend to be extremely chummy. Exhibit A: The time Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and Jimmy Fallon broke into James Corden’s bedroom to bid him farewell. 

This pop-cultural shift is perhaps most evident in the warm relationship between CBS’ The Late Show and NBC’s The Tonight Show. Once bitter rivals for the 11:35 p.m. time slot, nowadays, the respective hosts will casually chat over Zoom during the show, like it’s no big deal.

Things were clearly way more competitive back in the days when David Letterman and Jay Leno were still on TV. After all, the only reason that Letterman even had a competing show to begin with is because he was passed over for the Tonight Show gig in favor of Leno. It wasn’t just business, it was personal. Which made everything a lot more exciting.

The “Late Night Wars” were fought over people’s eyeballs, and that attention was measured in TV ratings. While Letterman beat Leno in the ratings initially, Leno eventually overtook him, following his famous “what the hell were you thinking?” interview with Hugh Grant. According to The Los Angeles Times, after that moment, Leno’s show “routinely beat Letterman in the ratings for the vast majority of the time they went head-to-head.”

So how did Letterman feel about losing out to Leno in the ratings department? The host recently spoke with GQ and was asked about this very issue.

Letterman acknowledged that he and Leno were two very different types of hosts. While he was more acerbic and ironic, Leno was, as Letterman put it, an “everyman,” and the type of “guy you’d want to have a beer with” (just long as the place where you’re getting a beer isn’t at the bottom of a 60-foot hill). 

And Leno’s ratings dominance really did seem to mess with Letterman’s head. “In the beginning it’s a huge assault and insult to your ego, because you think, ‘Well, no I’m the show, I’m the guy America’s been waiting on,’” Letterman explained. “And for a while I was, and then Jay overtakes me and continues to overtake me for the duration of (our) runs. So I had to figure out what that was. And I just think it was that simple.”

Letterman ultimately found peace of mind on this front when he “conjured” an explanation for why Leno’s show was, on paper, more popular than The Late Show. “I know for a fact that certain elemental mistakes were made on my part, but at the end of the day, his show was more likable than the show I was doing.”

Of course, there’s a big difference between “likable” and good. As the popularity of his YouTube channel and recent FAST Channel deal illustrate, a lot of Letterman’s bits still stand the test of time. “Jaywalking” and The Dancing Itos, not so much.