Cbs Looking For Ways To Reverse Letterman’S Slide

Is he too cranky? Too ironic? Too … Dave?

David Letterman is slipping, sliding, flailing. It’s no longer Jay vs. Dave in the late-night TV battle. Leno’s “Tonight Show” has beaten Letterman’s “Late Show” in the Nielsen ratings in 200 of the past 205 weeks, or for almost four consecutive years. Nowadays, Letterman finishes well behind Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” at 11:35. He’s even wheezing to stay ahead of Conan O’Brien’s talk show, which starts at the red-eye hour of 12:35 a.m.

Since Letterman’s vaunted switch from NBC to CBS in 1993, “Late Show” has shed nearly double-digit hunks of its audience every year. Last season, the number of people watching “Late Show” shrank by another 10 percent. That means Letterman now attracts an audience less than half the size of the one he started with on CBS.

The losses came despite CBS’ rise to No. 1 in prime time and the network’s resumption of NFL telecasts. Theoretically, football and “Touched by an Angel” should have reversed Dave’s descent, since the big audiences watching those programs were being bombarded with “Late Show” promos.

Instead, with a nightly average of 3.5 million viewers, “Late Show” now draws only 200,000 more viewers than Pat Sajak’s famously disastrous late-night talk show on CBS in 1989-90 (although Sajak admittedly didn’t have as much cable competition in his day).

Officially, CBS executives express no alarm. Financially, they say, the show remains strong with advertisers, who pay premium prices to reach Letterman’s generally affluent viewers. They point to last year’s Emmy Award (and 37 previous Emmy nominations) as evidence Letterman’s show remains creatively strong.

Nevertheless, CBS has begun “a fairly exhaustive” research project to analyze the late-night audience and how to bring more of it to CBS, says David Poltrack, CBS’ top research executive.

Letterman’s reps (Letterman himself was unavailable for comment) point out some factors he can’t control: There’s a mismatch between CBS’s prime-time audience (it’s older, with an average age of 52) and the average “Late Show” viewer (43). Letterman’s lead-in - the late local news - is relatively weak on many CBS affiliates; “Late Show” beats Leno in the few cities where the CBS station has the leading newscast.

Although Letterman just re-upped for three years on CBS, “Late Show” producer Rob Burnett isn’t sure what lies beyond that.