David Letterman - People also ask
David Letterman spent 33 years redefining American late-night television, then walked away in 2015. At 79 he is back in the conversation, partly through his Netflix interview series, partly because CBS just shut down the franchise he built.
David Letterman is the person most responsible for what American late-night television sounded like between 1982 and 2015. Born in Indianapolis on April 12, 1947, he came up as an Indiana weatherman and radio host, moved to Los Angeles to write and do stand-up, and got his own NBC show, Late Night with David Letterman, in 1982. The tone he built there, ironic, hostile to showbiz convention, structurally weird, became the default setting for a generation of hosts who followed.
After being passed over for The Tonight Show in 1992, he moved to CBS and launched Late Show with David Letterman in 1993. He hosted it until May 20, 2015, finishing with 6,080 episodes across both networks, more than anyone in the history of American late night, Johnny Carson included. Stephen Colbert took the chair after him.
He did not vanish. Since January 2018 he has hosted My Next Guest Needs No Introduction on Netflix, a slower, longer-form interview format that suits him better than a monologue-and-desk structure ever did in his final CBS years. Season 6 arrived in December 2025 and a seventh has been announced for later in 2026.
What put him back in the news in 2026 was the end of the franchise itself. CBS decided to retire The Late Show entirely rather than recast it, and Colbert’s last episode aired in May 2026. Letterman was openly critical of the network’s reasoning, and appeared with Colbert in the run-up to the finale. It is an unusual position for a retired host: watching the institution you built get closed rather than handed on.
He lives largely out of public view in North Salem, New York, with his wife Regina Lasko, whom he married in 2009, and their son Harry, born in 2003. He is 79. Sources: Netflix, Variety, CBS News, Wikipedia.