Late Night with David Letterman has featured on this blog many times, not least because it feels like a different lifetime, and it’s a show that we never got to see here in the UK. Here’s Dave helping his viewers come to terms with the cancellation of the NBC show Voyagers!.
Voyagers! was a sci-fi show created by James D. Parriott. It ran quite successfully for 20 episodes, and looked set to be renewed. But when 60 Minutes, the show it ran against, stumbled, NBC thought that the time was right to schedule a competing news show. Voyagers! was replaced by Monitor, which then tanked.
This feels like NBC revisited the idea a few years later with Quantum Leap.
In the school special above, Letterman mentions the great new hope of the coming fall schedule, Manimal. This is a show I watched when it aired in the UK, and was always confused as to why it suddenly vanished from my screen. Had we had Late Night, I would have known why.
Manimal was scheduled opposite the CBS powerhouse Dallas, and only lasted four episodes, before it was yanked off the air. The final three episodes were shown a month or so later. Here’s the opening title sequence.
It wasn’t the last we heard of Manimal though. Show creator Glen A Larson revisited the character in his late nineties series NightMan.
Make of that what you will.
Letterman is back on our screens, with a long form interview show on Netflix called My Next Guest Needs No Introduction. Somehow I doubt he will be bothering Drive-Thru booths, editing jokes out of the show live on air, or helping us deal with shows that Netflix has cancelled. It would be nice for a streaming service to pick up all of Late Night though. We can but hope.
