Die Deutsche Dave

by Aaron Barnhart

There's an old line David Letterman used, back in his days at NBC, whenever his staff would come up with some ludicrous show enhancement--a robot arm, for instance, that would hand him the evening's Viewer Mail, one piece at a time. After trying out one of these gadgets, he'd turn to the camera and somberly tell the home viewers, "Someday, ladies and gentlemen, all talk shows will be like this."

Throwaway line, or grim prophecy? I'd always thought the former, but now that I've seen Die Harald Schmidt Show, the new comedy-talk program airing Tuesdays through Saturdays on Germany's SAT.1 network, I'm not so sure. When it comes to shameless intellectual larceny, Jay Leno has nothing on this amazingly lifelike Late Show clone, which swipes nearly every on-air element of Letterman's program, right down to Dave's well-worn hand-chopping motions.

It starts with the show's opening, a familiar montage of city-at-night copter shots (the city in this case is Kšln, not New York) and floating TV graphics (a rectangular one for the show title, an oval one for the band). That's followed by a smirky intro ("And now, the secret son of the Queen of England . . . Harallllld Schmidt!") as we segue to the inside of the old theater restored especially for this show. Maybe recycled is a better word: From the brick-paneled backdrop to the shiny red floor and the host's neutral-colored "home base," this is Letterman's set to a tee.

And heeeeeere's Harald, sporting the shoulder-length hair and goofy little spectacles favored by most German pop icons, but dressed in one of those Italian suits favored by you know who. Schmidt chops the air with his arm-the band's cue to stop, of course-and plunges into his monologue, with its cavalcade of foreign and domestic names (references to British royalty abound).

While Schmidt's doing his standup, the show's director, with annoying frequency, intersperses shots of audience members enjoying the jokes, an obvious attempt to ape the technique pioneered by Hal Gurnee, Letterman's former director. Gurnee, however, understood that home viewers may take exception to being told what's funny, and that audience shots are better used as fodder for the host's wandering wit. But Schmidt won't needle his audience, so what's the point?

Otherwise, Schmidt puts forth a compelling impersonation of Dave. (Maybe he should've gotten the part in The Late Shift.) He feigns wonderment with his native tongue, repeating names like "Alois Schmidtbauer" (a common Bavarian moniker, I'm told) over and over. Another time, he catches himself pointing at his left temple; confiding in the camera, he says, "When I do this, I always think very hard." Or he'll stroll up to the camera lens and stick his big hairy Kopf into it, or swing his arm to puncture the air as the band obligingly creates a Shaffer- esque burst of noise.

Die Deutsche Dave also relies on a device practically trademarked by his Yankee counterpart: a stock visual gag dropped into the monologue night after night. A recent favorite features a man dressed as Prince Charles's lover Camilla, pounding the table and shrieking partly in English, "I want a fucking Scheidung [divorce]!" Another is Knast Kamera (Jail-Cam), a set of bars placed across the screen to illustrate what the Schmidt show looks like from the cell where Steffi Graf's allegedly tax-evading father is being held. (Schmidt told a German newspaper, "Vater Graf is to our show what O. J. Simpson is to the Americans.")

One time, Schmidt sent a camera to a video store adjoining his theater and did a remote interview with the sales clerk. The payoff, however, was disappointing: Schmidt merely talked the clerk into trading places with an audience member. The thing is, a few hours later you could've flipped over to RTL 2 and watched Dave do a similar shtick with his neighbors, albeit in English.

Die Harald Schmidt Show may be brazen, but it's only the latest foreign talker to ride the Dave wave. Late-night entertainment has become a global product in the 1990s, and judging by the e-mail I've gotten from around the world, Letterman is considered the gold standard. If there's an after-hours comedy-talk program in your country, chances are the producer has been recycling the same elements that were there in the beginning: the guests, the stand-ups, the boys in the band, the man on the street, giddy audiences, sexy dresses, viewer mail, and here's something we found in the newspaper. Until it was cancelled last year, the RTL network's Nachtshow starred Thomas Koschwitz, who read Top Ten lists, bantered with his bandleader, and used a set replicating the Late Show look and feel. I've heard about a Venezuelan talker from the late 1980s that was based on Dave's NBC show, a Brazilian Late Show clone taped in English with Portuguese subtitles, and a show from Norway called RiksDan, with a bantering bandleader and nightly Top Six List. ("This is a small country," my source explains.)

Perhaps the best-known of all the Letterman lookalikes over the years is Tonight Live With Steve Vizard, which ran on Australia's Channel Seven from 1990 to 1993 and whose host cheerfully confessed to mimicking Dave's NBC show. Vizard, an impresario who serves on national arts councils and organizes his country's version of Lollapalooza, has been an outspoken promoter of Australian television and film.

"It's about having a sense of identity," he told a radio interviewer last year, "and it's not just some ethereal notion, it's not some philosophical notion. It goes to people's self esteem. When people watch an athlete from their own country win a race, it says something about themselves. When people see a performer telling their own story on television, as opposed to a sitcom set in New York, be it however good, it says something about not just my culture, it says something about me. It gives me a sense of worth."

Vizard's suggestion--that a television format is little more than an empty bottle with a cultural message jammed into it--may not completely justify the plunder of programs like Letterman's, but does help put it in some perspective. After all, Letterman himself is guilty of borrowing elements of Jack Paar's and Steve Allen's shows (and, truth be told, even a couple of things from Leno). What can't be borrowed, but must be invented anew each time, is the show's central organizing element, namely the host. It is the host through whom all of the other elements--the writing, the guests, the look--are processed and filtered. The host must also affirm his viewers' taste--which are of course culturally driven--while at the same time seeming true to his own.

In this respect it is useful to compare Schmidt to Conan O'Brien, who in many ways is his mirror opposite. Conan inherited Dave's late-night franchise, but chose to remake it completely to reflect his own sensibilities. This decision served him well early on, when it was unclear whether he could broadcast his way out of a wet paper bag. These days, Conan's now-loyal core audience takes pride in the fact that, even at its lowest points, no one ever accused his Late Night of being a Letterman clone.

By contrast, Schmidt, a polished on-air performer--one fan of his earlier program, Schmidteinander, calls him "a genuinely funny and competent host, one of an extreme few in Germany"--apparently exercised little control over the format of his new show, and is taking a beating from critics for it. A magazine readers' poll revealed that detractors of his show outnumber supporters by nearly three to one. Some viewers can't believe he got on the air while another late-night host, Thomas Gottschalk, was taken off: "Lots of people didn't like [Gottschalk]," says one, "but at least he had his own style." Another complains, "I want the real Letterman, not an imitation."

Schmidt is popular enough that seats for his show are sold out through June. Still, it behooves him to find his own voice soon; for as Letterman himself could attest, nothing stays the same forever. Besides replacing his longtime producer, Robert Morton, last week, Dave has recently acquired a new opening sequence--instead of the eye in the sky, we now see a view from terra firma--and he's about to unveil a whole new look. This Tuesday marked the final appearance of Letterman's old set; this Wednesday he'll do a show from the lobby of the Ed Sullivan, take two nights off, then unveil a spanking new stage on Monday. When that happens, Harald Schmidt will have the only late-night show on the planet with a red floor.