First a beloved weatherman and children’s TV show host in Indianapolis, David Letterman eventually graduated to becoming a regular on game shows and talk shows in L.A. And after he filled in for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show with great success, NBC’s Fred Silverman gave Letterman his own 90-minute morning show, and the David Letterman Show was born.
However, in the early days, it did not start so well.
Before the new program even premiered, there was trouble. The show’s producer quit days before the show debuted in June 1980, so head writer Merrill Markoe, who had zero talk show experience, stepped into the role. A few weeks in, a new producer was hired, but the show continued to flounder and was cut down from 90 minutes to 60 a few weeks into its run. Writing for 30 fewer minutes per episode was a relief to Markoe, yet the show still struggled. And the biggest problem had nothing to do with staff turnover: David Letterman was simply not who the audience wanted to see at 10 a.m. He was stiff and had the hallmarks of nepotism, and it did not work.
Four months later, The David Letterman Show was cancelled. It wasn’t a complete failure, though; the show won three Daytime Emmys and saw the early development of several of Letterman’s signature recurring bits (e.g., “Viewer Mail,” “Small Town News,” and “Stupid Pet Tricks”). It was also where Letterman and Markoe first learned how to put together a talk show, which meant that when they got a second chance with NBC’s Late Night with David Letterman in 1982, they were well prepared for it.
Markoe worked with Letterman on Late Night until her departure in 1986, and before she went on to write for a variety of other TV shows. But the longest comedic relationship of her career was the one she built with Letterman, which began during those hectic four months as the head writer of his failed morning show, a wild experience she discussed with me on the 45th anniversary of The David Letterman Show’s debut.
It all started as a bit of a fluke. She met him at The Comedy Store, and once we started hanging out, he was beginning to host The Tonight Show, and I started writing him jokes for The Tonight Show. Then we were both on the Mary Tyler Moore variety show. I was a writer; he was in the cast. We also did a pilot before The David Letterman Show. It was a talk show called Leave It to Dave for local NBC affiliates, but it didn’t get picked up.
The early days of The David Letterman Show part deux
We were seeing one another, and I was a writer who knew how to write jokes for him. As with everything, we were just doing all the things we could think of that were funny and that we thought could be put into a talk-show format.
He was a student of the talk show. He really loved The Tonight Show and all the different permutations of it. I didn’t. My favourite show at the time was Saturday Night Live, and then there was something called Fernwood 2 Night with fake guests that I liked a lot — it was with Martin Mull and Fred Willard. I was also out of art school, and my favourite thing in the world was coming up with ideas.
Do you think he had more of a straight talk show in mind?
I don’t know. I think he wanted to be inventive. I never knew his career in Indianapolis, but he had a reputation for being wacky and having an unusual point of view, and I think he wanted that. Obviously, he wanted me to work with him, and he knew what I was. So, between us, we had a lot of agreement on what kind of crazy stuff we wanted to do, and then we hired people to try to help us.
Actually, the morning show was a pretty big disaster. We hired a horrible producer. It was a pretty big mess. The show hit the air without a producer, and I had to take it over. It was just a couple of days before, this guy named Bob Stewart, he really didn’t like the content that we were pushing to be on the show. During the run-throughs, he would sit in the booth and just shake his head. He tried to get us to remove all of it. Then he just quit a couple of days before we premiered. I guess he thought we would have to bring him back.
But I took it over. I had never worked on a talk show before, and I was suddenly the producer of the talk show. I’d never seen what a rundown for a talk show looked like, and I never knew how long the segments were supposed to be. I had to figure it out, and I had nobody to ask, “How long is a monologue? How long is an opening segment? How long do you interview a guest for?” I was just guessing. I had never timed a talk show, and I didn’t have time to sit there and time one now.
Someone from Dave’s management team said to me, “Hey, Merrill, is there anything I can do to help?” I went, “Yeah, can you tell me how long these segments should be?” And he said, “I meant more like, ‘Do you need me to get you coffee?’” I said, “Then I guess you can’t help me, because I know how to get coffee.”
Finally, around the third week, the show hired a producer named Barry Sand, who had once produced The Mike Douglas Show. It was a show that none of us liked, but Barry was a nice guy. Better yet, he knew how long segments were supposed to be.
What was your aversion to talk shows?
It wasn’t a thing I cared about. I’m the one person who didn’t really like Johnny Carson. But this was a morning talk show. The big morning talk show at the time was Regis and Kathie Lee, and it had on whoever was coming through promoting things. We were headed in a whole other direction. We wanted to just do original comedy.
In what ways did you want to shake up the format?
We weren’t trying to shake up the format so much as we were just trying to please ourselves and find stuff that we thought was really funny. Dave and I had a lot of the same sense of humour. I used to go by: If he and I both thought it was funny, there was a good chance that it would play well. If it was just me pushing it and he was resisting it, that probably wasn’t going to fly. And if he was just pushing it, he would get it on, but it probably wouldn’t be as funny as if I’d given him a hundred per cent on it.
One of the things we started doing was “Small Town News.” We subscribed to a whole lot of newspapers from all across the country, and we were looking through them for that eccentric, weird, local news story that’s funny enough to make jokes about, but also everyone relates to. This is also when we started doing “Stupid Pet Tricks.”
It was really cooking by the end there. We were an idea pool, coming up with all kinds of things. At the very end, we sort of went for everything because we thought, “Well, why not?”
Along those lines, we had a little contest about who wants to have the show come to their house. We took the whole show to Iowa. We had a show where we offered someone to have a big event on the set. There was this couple, Sam and Betty Cotenoff, and they had their 50th wedding anniversary in the space behind the sliding doors on the set, and we’d do little cutaways and check in on how they were doing. At the end, the designer we hired to make it look festive dropped polyester rose petals from the ceiling. Everyone had sparklers, though, and when the sparklers hit the rose petals, they hit the floor burning, and there were fires on the set.
It turned out later to be really funny, but at the time, we thought, “Alright, now we’re really cooked.” You can’t set a TV show on fire. But later, we were laughing and laughing and laughing about it.
Again, we were going through a miasma of ideas, just every single thing we could think of to put on the show that wasn’t a typical talk show. When we went to do the late-night show later, I was pulling everything that had worked on the morning show and transposing it into the late-night show. It was the same sensibility; the only difference was that the show was meeting the right audience.
The audience for the morning show, we were told, was going to be “housewives.” I remember being in a fight with network people — it was an all-male group — and they were saying, “Women don’t want to watch this kind of thing.” I was saying, “How can you say that to me? I’m the only woman in here!” And then, I’m thinking to myself, “No, they actually don’t want to watch this stuff.” They wanted us to do makeovers and astrology, and maybe that would’ve worked, but probably not with Dave.
Did you face much pressure from the network to change the show?
The monumental meeting that I remember most — because it was the stupidest one — was when they told me they liked the idea of “Stupid Pet Tricks,” but they wanted us to do it with trained animals. We ignored that and just went ahead with the same thing we were doing anyway. We ignored pretty much all of their advice, and we were off the air before you could blink your eyes.
Before the show got cancelled, what was the response to it?
We were told that students were getting together and watching it in the dorms. I still hear from people who say, “You made my senior year great.” I mean, the people who watched it really loved it. I have here a telegram from Martin Scorsese on the occasion of the cancellation, saying that the cast and crew of Raging Bull had gotten together every day to watch it. It had its fans, for sure.
Can you talk about the cancellation?
After we got cancelled, I was like, “Oh my God, what a nightmare.” Dave and I parted ways after that. He was a very unhappy guy, and I went off on my own. Until he got another show, and then he wanted me to return because, at that point, I knew how to do the show. It was because of all that experimentation that I knew how to do the show that Dave and I wanted to do.
