Hicks on Letterman on Friday

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on January 29th, 2009

And Hicks’ mom, too.

And they’ll show Hicks’ last set on the show– the one that was bumped. (Hicks died at age 32. Next month, it will be 15 years since he passed, so there’ll be lots of retrospectives and tributes.)

It’s mysterious as to why they would re-run the set. The official explanation for not running it in the first place was that “was new at CBS, was riding high in the ratings, and didn’t want any trouble.” (That’s according to Aaron Barnhart. In the same article, Barnhart also calls Virginia Heffernan’s argument in Slate that the bumping of the set was not censorship. He calls her assertion “high-handed.” She cites Stanly Fish’s piece from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Read all three to be totally prepared for tomorrow night’s spectacle. Regular readers of this site can pretty much figure out where we might come down on the matter.)

Perhaps it’s the flip side of Letterman’s situation 15 years later– He’s been at CBS forever, and, in June of this year, Hollywood Reporter said that Late Show tied its lowest-ever adults 18-49 rating.” Is it cynical to conclude that perhaps now the show’s producers want to actively court a form of “trouble” radically different from that which they were avoiding in 1993?

But will it work? Will it cause trouble (the kind of trouble that translates into ratings?)

Judging from this letter, in which Hicks describes the set almost word for word, it’s a long shot. Although there has been a lot of buzz on the WWW.

The true mystery is how the set got approved. How it made it all the way to taping. If the set was that controversial, surely the talent coordinator (Bob Morton) would have known that it was unairable. Perhaps it was just a simple case of a coordinator messing up. It’s happened before.

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