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6 January 2008
Return of the TV Jedi
The well known and documented rivalry between David Letterman and Jay Leno took a new turn when these well known late night TV stars returned to air after two months of a bitter strike by film and TV writers.
David Letterman, who has never again reached the heights of his top rankings of 1995, gets the chance to up his ratings and gain the upper hand as he makes a comeback along with his writing team. He also has the awesome backing of the Writers Guild of America due to the specially negotiated deal between his production company and the union.
The special agreement was announced last week and it enables David to make a comeback with a long and full complement of monologue jokes with comedy bits and also includes his nightly Top 10 List. This makes it a lot easier for him to book guests who may not have bothered to appear.
All this happening could have Jay Leno and his writing team facing trouble in getting celebrity guests that are members of the Screen Actors Guild. With CBS announcing on Monday that the "Late Show with David Letterman" would feature the actor Robin Williams with Ellen Page and the Canadian star of the art-house movie hit "Juno" to follow consecutively, Jay would have a lot to contend with. In contrast, the NBC's show "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" has only announced their first guest who is the Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee.
Both these shows resorted to reruns when the WGA went on strike in protest against major studios on Nov 5. This happened due to a contract dispute and has been labeled Hollywood's worst labor clash in 20 years. The major cause was the disagreement over the compensation to writers for the work published on the Internet.
Jay and David along with other late-night stars went against the strike to renew production for a few weeks while the ratings for reruns plunged. They started to plan their return on the collapse of talks which happened on Dec 7.
David was successful in cutting a deal with WGA for his show and "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson," on CBS since both the shows are produced by his own company WorldWide Pants Inc. In these negotiations, David also managed to score points with the union due to being critical of executives that took part in the WGA talks. He went on to describe them on his show as "cowards, cutthroats and weasels."
While the shows seem to be back on track, some celebrities and guests belonging to the WGA's sister union, the Screen Actors Guild, may boycott them in support of the striking writers. In stark contrast, SAG President Alan Rosenberg announced that his union's members "will be happy to appear" with Letterman and Ferguson.
This strike certainly adds a new angle to the Jay-David rivalry that has its history in Jay being chosen over Letterman when the then NBC's late-night host Johnny Carson retired in 1992 from The Tonight Show. At this juncture David jumped to CBS and was leading in the ratings for the first two years. However, Jay Lenos populist tone brought him to the top of the pile, while critics still preferred David Letterman.
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