"Letterman’s replacement: Can he (or she!) please be a grown-up?"

WaPo's Hank Stuever asks, and I'm more interested in why one would ask for a "grown-up" than in who the grown-ups are who could actually do the old-fashioned gig that is a late-night talk show. Me, I'm beyond grown-up. I'm old. Not as old as Letterman, but old. I watched a good bit of Johnny Carson back in the 60s and early 70s, in the days before you could record a TV show, when the fact that a show came on late actually meant something. And my kids and I eagerly consumed TiVo'd Letterman back in the 90s.

This blog began in '04, and when I look through this blog's Letterman tag, I don't find material that is based on my watching the show as a show, just news stories and clips I consumed because things were being talked about on-line. In 2009, I had "Is it really so terrible that David Letterman has a bachelor pad in the building where he tapes his show?" and "Oops, Letterman really is the lecher he seems to goofily pretend to be." How did he survive that? I guess the Women Warriors of America were not so fierce 5 years ago. And that was not long after he got in so much trouble mocking Sarah Palin that NOW took Palin's side of the argument.

But finally, Letterman is leaving the show that was created to give Letterman a place to be when Leno got to replace Johnny Carson on the "Tonight" show. Why should that place persist at all? Who cares what's on CBS at a specific time on the week-night schedule? The question of who will replace him seems like a formalistic mental exercise, a test of our values, and nothing that real people will make a habit of living with 5 nights a week. So, by all means, the columnists will blather about the pick as if it symbolizes something, and maybe at long last it will be a woman or — Stuever's idea — a grown-up.

Stuever is not calling the network to a new level of maturity. He sees Letterman as the grown-up. Grown-up compared to the Jimmys (Fallon and Kimmel). Stuever's just hoping for someone who can carry on the traditional art of "light conversation."

I hope that the person who gets his job will, in turn, present a show that looks and feels as if it belongs on CBS. 

Now, that's really old-fashioned, the idea that the networks have a brand, a personality, and, within that mindset, CBS is classy.

That doesn’t mean old, but it does mean something ineffable and increasingly impossible to describe in an era in which all media formats are in a state of reinvention.

Come on, Stuever. If you're going to use The Washington Post to express your longing for worthy conversation, don't stumble into blabber like "something ineffable and increasingly impossible to describe." Increasingly impossible? What does that even mean? It's increasingly impossible — i.e., it was impossible years ago — to give a damn about what network TV shows were on and which celebrities were promoting themselves with the assistance of which reasonably witty, nice enough,  suitably bland guys.