The Morning Show

When I was in 7th grade, I came down with walking pneumonia, and had a blissful two weeks recovering from that strangely symptom-less disease at home from school. This was, in our house at least, the pre-VCR era, if you can imagine such a barbaric thing, and so I was fully dependent on the five channels of programming we had in our non-cable household. Most years this would have been a depressing prospect for a twelve-year-old, given that the weekday morning slots on television were dedicated, almost exclusively, to soap operas and game shows. But my illness turned out to have perfect timing: it coincided with the brief period where NBC was running, for no discernible reason, a day-time talk show hosted by an obscure young comic named David Letterman. He was like nothing I had ever seen on television: wry and slightly self-loathing and seemingly baffled by the fact that he had been given an hour of network television to fill every weekday morning. (The joke I still chuckle over, and quote once or twice a year, comes from an episode where they take the crew back to Letterman’s hometown. I remember nothing of the show itself other than one brief aside that Letterman makes, as they are driving through the pastoral landscape of rural Indiana. The camera passes by a herd of cattle, clustered in a field along the highway, and you hear Letterman mutter, almost to himself, “Look at those huge dogs.”) I remember going back to school when I finally recovered, and feeling like I had stumbled across a new superpower, a way of being funny that would soon be casually described as “Lettermanesque.” I still think that bout of walking pneumonia was one of my life’s lucky breaks: it gave me a sneak peak at the Late Night sensibility, watching TV on some random Tuesday morning in the suburbs of D.C, a year or two ahead of just about everyone else. It was liking cheating on the exam of cool.