David Letterman: I Wanted Jon Stewart!!

From David Itzkoff’s New York Times interview with David Letterman, whose final episode of “The Late Show” airs May 20.

NYT: Did you have any involvement in choosing Stephen Colbert as your successor?

LETTERMAN: No. Not my show. When we sign off, we’re out of business with CBS. I always thought Jon Stewart would have been a good choice. And then Stephen. And then I thought, well, maybe this will be a good opportunity to put a black person on, and it would be a good opportunity to put a woman on. Because there are certainly a lot of very funny women that have television shows everywhere. So that would have made sense to me as well.

NYT: But you were not consulted?

LETTERMAN: [shakes head no] Mm-mmm.

NYT: Did that bother you?

LETTERMAN: Yeah, I guess so. Just as a courtesy, maybe somebody would say: “You know, we’re kicking around some names. Do you have any thoughts here?” But it doesn’t bother me now. At the time, I had made the decision [to leave] and I thought, O.K., this is what comes when you make this decision.

Subsequent to CBS’ Colbert announcement, Stewart revealed he never interviewed to replace Letterman.

Letterman also expresses some surprise that CBS didn’t fire him during his sex scandal, or after guest hosts replaced him during his medical recoveries, or because for the better part of two decades his ratings came to consistently lag Jay Leno and his ABC timeslot competition.

For two years, from the “Late Show” launch in August 1993 until Leno’s famous “What were you thinking?” Hugh Grant interview in July 1995, Letterman would routinely beat Leno’s “Tonight Show” in the ratings -- but Grant brought a reversal of fortune. Letterman began losing to Leno consistently, a state of affairs that continued until Leno’s final “Tonight Show” nearly two decades later. Letterman seems to regret his inability to retake the late night crown. “People just liked watching his show more than they liked watching my show,” he concedes.

LETTERMAN: In the beginning [at CBS], we came out of the chute, going a million miles an hour. And then when that was all done, we just sort of said, “Really, can we go a million miles an hour again?” And we tried, and we couldn’t. Another passage:

NYT: When you moved to CBS, so much was made of your rivalry with Jay Leno. In retrospect, do you feel like this was overblown?

LETTERMAN: No, I don’t think so.

Find all of Itzkoff’s excellent interview with Letterman here.