Late Night with David Letterman

After Letterman's NBC morning show was cancelled in October 1980, NBC gave the 33-year-old comedian a $20,000-per-week deal to sit out a year and repeatedly guest-host The Tonight Show while it groomed him for a new late-night project.

NBC's decision to launch Late Night at 12:30 a.m. displaced Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Coast to Coast program; when NBC offered Snyder a later timeslot instead, he refused and ended his show, with its final episode airing December 17, 1981.

Because Late Night was produced by Johnny Carson's production company under a contractual clause giving Carson control of the slot after The Tonight Show, Carson's company imposed rules on Letterman, barring him from having a sidekick like Ed McMahon, giving Paul Shaffer's band a horn section, booking old-school guests like Jimmy Stewart or George Burns, or replicating signature Tonight Show bits such as 'Stump the Band' or 'Carnac the Magnificent'.

Head writer Merrill Markoe, Letterman's girlfriend at the time, stepped down from that role in fall 1982 partly to help preserve their personal relationship, which had been strained by the demands of daily production.

Chris Elliott joined the show at age 21 as a production assistant handling the 'Stupid Pet Tricks' segment before being promoted to writer and recurring on-air performer.

The show's house band, led by NBC staff musician Paul Shaffer, was informally called 'The World's Most Dangerous Band' in its earliest episodes, then went unnamed for years before the nickname was officially reinstated in 1988.

The series premiere on February 1, 1982, opened with Larry 'Bud' Melman delivering lines as a homage to the prologue of Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, followed by Letterman entering to Tchaikovsky's 'Piano Concerto No. 1' behind a group of 'peacock girl' dancers who had also appeared on the finale of The David Letterman Show.

For visual comedy segments, Letterman was dressed in outfits like a Velcro suit and thrown at a Velcro wall, a suit covered in potato chips and dunked in dip, a Rice Krispies suit doused with milk, and an Alka-Seltzer suit dunked in water.

In one experimental episode, the entire on-screen picture rotated a full 360 degrees over the course of the hour, meaning the image appeared completely upside-down at the midpoint of the show.

On May 23, 1991, hours after Johnny Carson announced his retirement from The Tonight Show, he made a surprise appearance on Late Night for a friendly chat that many interpreted as a symbolic passing of the torch to Letterman—though NBC gave the job to Jay Leno instead two weeks later.

NBC's decision to choose Jay Leno over Letterman as Carson's successor had reportedly already been made well before the public announcement, with Leno and his manager secretly signing a deal guaranteeing him The Tonight Show on May 16, 1991.

When Letterman left NBC for CBS in 1993, NBC retained intellectual property rights to several popular Late Night segments, forcing changes such as renaming 'Viewer Mail' to 'CBS Mailbag' and 'The World's Most Dangerous Band' to 'Paul Shaffer and the CBS Orchestra,' though Letterman kept rights to 'Stupid Pet Tricks' since it originated on his earlier morning show.

A 1991-92 syndication deal that put Late Night reruns on the A&E cable channel five nights a week was brokered without Letterman's knowledge; his on-air complaints that it diluted the value of first-run NBC broadcasts led to the deal ending early in 1992.