Interviews, conversations and David Letterman

(Photo from Netflix)

Years ago I did a phone interview with an actress who had a new series, and it was a rapid chat, her answers coming as quickly as I could ask a question. At the end I told her she'd been fast. "Do you know how many of these I've done today?"
Our talk, it was clear, was not a conversation; it was a transaction, her getting publicity, me getting enough for a story my readers might like.
I did a lot of transactional interviews during my career, more than I like to remember now. More often than not an interview had a specific purpose, and a fixed amount of time, and did not go much beyond either.
Not always, especially when a remark took us down a different road. (I've told students more than once that, as thoroughly prepared as you are for an interview, you also have to listen to the person you're interviewing -- don't be too bound to the questions you've prepared.)
Molly Shannon and I once began comparing some personal notes which were more interesting to her than the movie we were talking about; we ended up going through the movie-related questions, then taking time for the personal stuff. Kevin Hooks and I, talking about a movie he had directed, found ourselves talking as well about fathers and sons.
I bring up this rambling reminiscence because I thought about it recently while watching David Letterman's Netflix series "My Next Guest Needs No Introduction." Specifically, I watched the episode with Tina Fey, which had a couple of gems -- Fey's terse rejoinder to Letterman about his lack of women writers on his broadcast shows, and her longer discussion of what did and did not work in her Charlottesville cake-eating monologue for "Saturday Night Live."
The first item might have fit into a Fey appearance on one of Letterman's old shows -- if he had raised the issue there. The second probably would not; it was too long, and too complicated, to be a transaction in a network talk-show appearance. Even more, before and after her comments, Letterman shared his own thinking about the cake piece, even disagreeing with the Fey's assessment. In other words, he was not a "host" in the old late-night sense, but a collaborator in a discussion. He and Fey were having a conversation.
This is a rare thing on television. For that matter, interviews are increasingly rare, especially on news channels. More often they are staged combat, no one willing to acknowledge a different point of view has merit, fewer and fewer people willing even to agree on what constitutes a fact, all at a pace so swift that there's no time to pause to absorb the basic arguments, let alone any nuances.
This is not to say that conversation has vanished. Jerry Seinfeld (who has also appeared with Letterman on Netflix) offers the ambling and amiable way of talk in his "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee," for instance. But Letterman has found in the commercial-free, flexible time on Netflix a chance to ... just .. talk. He will concede the occasional promotional need -- with Fey, for example, touting the Broadway version of "Mean Girls." Still, he approached the chat as a whole more casually, more "Hey, here's something we might find interesting to discuss." I know, Letterman could take side trips in his broadcast segments, too; but this is different.
When I talked to Kevin Hooks, the conversation involved me revealing something about myself as well as delving into Hooks's thoughts. Molly Shannon and I took a turn because of my acknowledging part of my own life. And that's part of what makes Letterman's show so interesting, at least in the Fey segment. As much as we saw of Fey, we also saw other sides of Letterman himself. Not necessarily flattering, either; as he tried to shrug off his failure to hire women, saying they probably would not want to work on his show, you could see Fey's need to fire back, and then the shot: “Yeah, we did want to write on it, though.” But even with his massive beard obscuring his face, Letterman hid less of himself -- willing not merely to interview, but to converse.