Most welcome. David (or his managers) are slowly claiming copyright on these shows (no issue there). Once in a while, along with the claim, he/they choose to block a video as well.

You're most welcome, Robin. I have a wide, varied archive of material. More Letterman shows will be covered as time allows. It's a process to view material, capturing video and rendering for YT.

This really was NBCs decade

@@DanNikon1776 Ironically, led by two people who built their national careers with the help of Letterman's Late Night show, they being Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno.

Unless, of course, you're talking about _Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman._

Probably is at least one factor in their losing so many stronger affiliates in the mid-90s.

Add to it the fact that a number of New World-owned CBS stations defected to FOX at the dawn of the previous NFL season and you have a recipe for disaster. @@CrowTRobot-ni7zu

interesting

I had this exact same thought, but didn't know when to put a date on it. I almost felt like the show felt different before and after 9/11, but 1995 onwards was a more relaxed but struggling Letterman that couldn't match the fresh and intense energy he had from about the mid 80s to the mid 90s. It's kind of sad to be honest.

It's not like his monologues always landed in the '80s either. Or that every remark he made at the desk went over well back then. I just watched one from 1987 or so when the audience was basically dead throughout all his jokes. I don't see a problem with this episode, but I agree it got worse later. If I recall, Leno dove headfirst into O.J. jokes, while Letterman held back for a long time, thinking it was inappropriate. I think that played a big part in Leno capturing more audience. He was capturing the zeitgeist of what people wanted to hear from comedy at that time. And, of course, Leno had stronger lead-ins from NBC's more successful primetime programming. Letterman's highest ratings were when his show was airing after the 1994 Winter Olympics on CBS. Near the end of his CBS run, his show was still earning more ad revenue than all of his competitors, so the lower ratings weren't exactly a debacle for the show. My feeling on what changed about the show is that Letterman made a shift from being a bad boy rebel to being Hollywood royalty. It played out like a political revolution. His supporters loved him when he was an underdog, and loved taking the victory lap with him when he finally became king of late night. The Drew Barrymore flashing in 1995 was probably the peak of his victory lap. But, after that, the story is over, and there's nowhere to go from there. Whatever criticism people had of the establishment when they started backing the rebels now gets redirected on the rebels themselves, once they become the leaders. Now they're the ones who are in the position of facing criticism for using their power ineffectively. With early Letterman, you never knew if he was going to offend a guest, or if they were going to offend him. That changed after CBS, when no celebrity would dare risk offending him, and when he was too powerful to "punch down" at other celebrities and still look good doing it. If he interrupted someone else's show with a megaphone in the '80s, they could get really mad at him, but they couldn't anymore after he became royalty. At the same time, the show seemed to focus more on celebrities now that it was in a competitive battle for ratings in the 11:30 slot. I lost interest in the show because I stopped caring about listening to Hollywood actors. It seemed like he dealt less with regular people in the 2000s. And there was less originality coming out of his comedy bits. I could be wrong, as I really didn't watch the show in the 2000s, and didn't even watch the final episode.