Letterman pants’s the competition

Hey, so damn this holiday week with me trying to take some time off and the news refusing to cooperate.

Turns out 2008 will see some new, original scripted programming aside from midseason replacement series after all: The Writers Guild and David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants reached a deal that will return writers for his show and Craig Ferguson’s beginning on Wednesday.

So this could be interesting: Letterman was riding high in late-night after defecting to CBS until the summer of ’95, when Jay Leno landed Hugh Grant as a guest a few days after the actor got busted with a prostitute; Leno’s performance that night convinced people to migrate back to his show. Now, with Leno/O’Brien/Stewart/Colbert/Kimmel busking and Letterman not only boasting scripted comedy material but likely getting the best guests, as well, as actors won’t be crossing picket lines to appear on his show, will we witness a new epoch in the late-night wars?

Rob Burnett, who serves as the head of Letterman’s Pants, sent the wrong message Friday when he said in a statement, “We'll be ready Wednesday, even if it takes a few more days after that to get up to speed.” Actually, Letterman needs to hit the ground running faster and harder than Devin Hester, proving decisively on Wednesday’s telecast that his show is so clearly superior to his competition’s pretenders that no one’d consider watching anything else. And, since the strike still has no end in sight, Letterman could pile up a lot of goodwill among fans and casual viewers and reclaim the late-night mantle.

The WGA seemed to be sensing this in its statement on the agreement with Letterman, which fairly baldly called for Leno to remain competitive: “It’s time for NBC-Universal to step up to the plate and negotiate a company-wide deal that will put Jay Leno, who has supported our cause from the beginning, back on the air with his writers.” It’s unlikely NBC will acknowledge the WGA’s invitation/threat/taunt, unless the skinflint uberlords of the AMPTP have seriously underestimated the resolve of those under their umbrella. (Still, you have to admit that blowing off AMPTP can be awfully tempting: If you’re CBS and you sign an interim deal with the WGA, putting your shows back into production, suddenly you’re kicking your competition’s hindquarters something bloody. Besides, someone somewhere understands that the writers deserve those pennies per download.)

Meanwhile, the return of the late-night hosts begs the question: What actually constitutes “writing?” An idea that leads up to a possible joke? Also, how long will viewers accept athletes, authors and D-listers as viable talk-show guests?

And the AMPTP declared Friday that the strike has officially cost writers more than they hoped to make off any new idea – $150 million, and counting. Sure, but the idea of the strike was to make sure that said money got into the hands of the right people. Nonetheless, it’d be more instructive if one of those rapidly spinning counters on AMPTP’s website showed how much money the producers were losing off this strike, since it’s clear they don’t really care how much anyone else is losing except for propaganda reasons. (If they really cared about IATSE crews, wouldn’t they be covering their losses?)

So anyway, I and my Security Detail (Wally the schipperke) are currently at an undisclosed location, but we will disclose this much: If Southern California got this much rain, the drought would be over (my Security Detail is not so thrilled with this fact, though he did sort of seem to dig taking a leak on redwood trees 175 times his age). Also, we met a guy who ran a really cool record store who had some great out-of-school Bob Dylan stories.