David Letterman often seems indifferent at the desk -- especially when sitting across from guests with whom he's not particularly familiar -- in the best of times. But his two interviews this week with pretty young women -- "Glee's" Lea Michelle on Monday and "Dollhouse's" Eliza Dushku on Tuesday -- were especially awkward.

The host seemed distracted in both cases, a complete stranger to both of the Fox series (he told Dushku he's asleep when he isn't doing his program) and perhaps -- and maybe I'm projecting here -- uncomfortable being juxtaposed visually with beautiful young women in extremely flattering dresses while conjecture swirls around him about who he might have slept with on his show's staff.

Both nights, notably, Letterman's monologue was quite funny. But you have a feeling for the foreseeable future that what comes after that will give a pretty good indication of what sort of toll having his private life exposed is exacting upon him.

Update: My sense of David Letterman has always been that he's one of those guys that probably doesn't function terribly well outside the comfort zone of his talkshow. But in that setting, he's in control.

So it's no surprise that Letterman has used that venue to handle the fallout from last week's disclosures -- which he did again Monday -- about as well as he could, especially when he started to tell jokes about Bill Clinton and South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, only to stop himself and look chagrined.

The host made light of the situation at his own expense, then expressed contrition to the staff for putting them through the ringer of tabloid speculation. For good measure, he apologized to Sarah Palin again, you know, just because.

Whatever you want to say about his personal life, his instincts as a broadcaster -- and in this context, that goes beyond merely being a comic -- serve him extremely well in these situations, where he has to step out of his latenight clown role.

Letterman surely would have rather not had to become the story, but he appears to have employed a bit of comic jujitsu, milking the humor from his predicament.

Does it make him sympathetic? Perhaps not. Is it smart? Absolutely.

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Having taken the weekend to absorb coverage of David Letterman's admission that he had sexual relationships with women on his show's staff -- a disclosure brought about by an alleged blackmail plot -- the oddest wrinkle has been the question whether the latenight host's audience would be disappointed in him, or if he'd be hurt by charges of hypocrisy.

To which I can only ask: Since when have our most popular comedians been choirboys?

Johnny Carson certainly wasn't, and had the ex-wives to prove it. He was just lucky enough to have operated for much of his career during an era where there was less conspicuous probing into private closets -- or at least, much of the press turned a blind eye, in the same way that JFK's liaisons went unreported.

One TV news outlet contacted Variety on Friday looking for a wise man to comment about whether Letterman's revelation's would diminish his popularity and ratings. Although I passed (not only is it a dumb question, but we'll know soon enough), I was hard-pressed to think of a recent example where that was the case.

The public has also had decades in which to get used to the fact that their favorite comedians engage in questionable behavior and relationships. Jerry Seinfeld -- then in his late 30s -- began dating Shoshanna Lonstein around her 18th birthday during "Seinfeld's" run. Bill Cosby -- America's dad for most of the 1980s -- admitted to an extramarital "rendezvous." The list could go on and on (Charlie Chaplin comes to mind), but why bother?

For a figure as private as Letterman, having to go public with this story is doubtless its own personal kind of Hell. In terms of an additional price to be paid, though, barring any unexpected wrinkles, an educated guess would say that beyond people who don't like him already (see Sarah Palin fans), the pain ends there.

Quote of the day, from Jeff Gaspin, Chairman, NBC Universal Television Entertainment, regarding the debut of "The Jay Leno Show" on Monday: "It's great to launch this innovative new show with such strong initial sampling, but we realize this is just one night and that we're going to build our business in this time period with ratings that will level out over time. Our focus is on delivering a great show and developing a consistent comedy viewing habit at 10 p.m. over the long haul."

Translation: "You're not going to get to bitch-slap us all over again for proclaiming anybody the 'new king' of anything after one night, like we did with Conan O'Brien."

Smart guy, that Gaspin. And also smart of NBC to include the 25-54 demographic prominently in its press release, since Leno figures to do markedly better by that older-skewing measure over time than among adults age 18-49, the standard that NBC and other networks usually tout.

Here was the tale-o'-the-tape breakdown on Monday for Leno:

Total viewers: 18.4 million

Adults 18-49: 5.3 rating

Adults 25-54: 6.4 rating

And one afterthought on some of the reaction to the program that's been dribbling in: My guess is some of the people criticizing the premiere hadn't actually tried sitting through an entire episode of "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" in ages, except perhaps for his final episode. Frankly, "Same show, different time" would have nearly sufficed as a review, but where's the fun in that?

Finally, I must confess to being a trifle amused (and more than a little terrified) about the comment posted on my review by someone seemingly obsessed with the size of Leno's feet.

His feet? Really? I mean, sure, he looked like he was standing on a symbol from "The Da Vinci Code," but his feet?

Jay Leno has always prided himself on being an equal-opportunity offender when it comes to politics. But by airing on NBC, he's now a target for an occasional guest on his show: Fox News' Bill O'Reilly.

At the end of Wednesday's program, O'Reilly featured Leno in his "Pinheads & Patriots" segment, right after the pictures of topless protesters. Well actually, not Leno so much -- that was just the tease to go hunting for bigger game.

"If Jay Leno fails at 10 p.m.," O'Reilly said, the entire network might be "doomed for another year." He then moved on to deride NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker for ruining NBC and referred to Keith Olbermann merely as "someone" on MSNBC, which is as close as O'Reilly will come to saying Olbermann's hated name. Of course, on Tuesday's show, Olbermann said he has the de facto top-rated program in cable news, since Fox doesn't qualify as a news network.

Once again, New York Times, great work on that "Voices From Above Silence a Cable TV Feud" Page One story.

Earlier in the show O'Reilly hosted Fox's Glenn Beck, as he regularly does, this time to allow Beck to talk about the orchestrated protest against him that has cost Beck's program about three dozen sponsors. O'Reilly never seems quite to know what to make of Beck, which is understandable: Olbermann has taken to calling him Lonesome Rhodes -- a reference to Andy Griffith's loathsome TV huckster in Elia Kazan's prescient movie "A Face in the Crowd" -- and Beck manages to stay interesting mostly by always appearing as if he's thisclose to a complete on-air meltdown.

Not to say that the whole feud/name-calling thing is growing tedious, but in hindsight, my favorite part was probably the topless protesters.

At times, the dueling spin coming from networks begins to approach the level of alternative realities -- a bit like flipping back and forth between MSNBC's Rachel Maddow and Fox News' Sean Hannity, or scanning the lead items on the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post.

So it is with the David Letterman-Conan O'Brien derby, where NBC is frantically touting "The Tonight Show's" younger demos while CBS crows about Letterman drawing a larger audience than his latenight counterpart for the first time in more than three years.

The most interesting figure being pushed by NBC is the median age of the audience -- namely, that O'Brien's viewers clock in at just under 46 by that measure, while Letterman's posse perhaps not unexpectedly skews significantly older, at 57. That's reasonably close to the age gap between the two hosts.

That means that the O'Brien audience is more attractive to media buyers chasing younger men, but also that the older contingent that had been watching Jay Leno has pretty quickly abandoned him -- as evidenced by the just-released total audience figures for the week of June 15-19: "Late Show With David Letterman," 3.5 million; "The Tonight Show," 3.3 million. Even with a clear boost for Letterman thanks to the fabricated, media-stoked flap involving Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, that's a fairly steep decline for O'Brien from "Tonight's" overall average under Leno.

The truth is latenight is no longer a zero-sum game given all the options that are available, so both shows can thrive in slightly different quadrants. Yet NBC has been perhaps understandably fierce about proclaiming O'Brien the "new king of latenight" and madly spinning to reinforce that impression. (See my earlier column on this.)

The real mistake would be reading a shift as a failure somehow on O'Brien's part. If anything, both shows are doing a pretty good job of defying gravity, given how mediocre the primetime ratings for the major networks have been since Memorial Day.

Meanwhile, the ratings breakdown of the two programs puts the consumer press, in particular, in an awkward spot: In terms of cultural sway, total viewers is the obvious number to go by, as well as the easiest for lay people to understand, as in "X million people watched." From a business perspective, though, staying ahead among younger demos is significant. So at this point, who wins the war of spinning the referees, as it were, is far from an inconsequential point.

So you be the judge. Here are a few key passages from the respective releases.

CONAN HAS INCREASED 'TONIGHT'S' DEMO DOMINANCE, WINNING THE WEEK BY A 67 PERCENT MARGIN OVER 'LATE SHOW,' UP FROM A 53 PERCENT WIN LAST YEAR AND A 34 PERCENT LEAD EARLIER THIS SEASON

CONAN DELIVERS DECISIVE DEMO MARGINS OVER ALL BROADCAST AND CABLE COMPETITION FOR THE WEEK 

CONAN'S AUDIENCE IS 11 YEARS YOUNGER THAN 'LATE SHOW'S,' AND CONAN IS EVEN YOUNGER THAN HE WAS ON 'LATE NIGHT' FOR THE SAME WEEK LAST YEAR

The median age of Conan's audience last week was 45.8, more than 11 years younger than Letterman's 57.0.  Conan is also younger than he was a year ago on "Late Night," where the median age of his audience for this same week one year ago was 48.5.

In the younger half of the key 18-49 demographic, adults 18-34, Conan won the week by a towering 164 percent margin (930,000 adults 18-34 vs. "Late Show's" 352,000), up from 103 percent for the same week last year and up from 50 percent for "Tonight" this season through the end of May.

Meanwhile, from CBS' press department, a more straightforward assertion -- and a "first time since 2005" breakthrough, which ought to command tomorrow's headlines:

"LATE SHOW" BEATS "THE TONIGHT SHOW"

"Late Show with David Letterman" Tops "The Tonight Show"

Among Viewers in a Full Week of Original Broadcasts for the First Time Since 2005

 

"Late Show" Continues To Narrow the Gap in Adults 18-49

"The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson" Closes the Gap

with "Late Night with Jimmy Fallon"

           

            CBS's LATE SHOW with DAVID LETTERMAN beat "The Tonight Show" in viewers for the first time in a full week of original broadcasts since December 2005, according to Nielsen live plus same day ratings for the week ending June 19, the third week since Conan O'Brien took over as host of "The Tonight Show."

 

LATE SHOW with DAVID LETTERMAN delivered a 2.5/06 in households with an average of 3.46m viewers, up +14% in households (from 2.2/06) and +13% in viewers (from 3.05m) compared to the same week last year. 

 

LATE SHOW beat "The Tonight Show" in households (2.5/06 vs. 2.3/06, +9%) and viewers (3.46m vs. 3.32m, +4%).  LATE SHOW beat "The Tonight Show" in viewers against an all-first run week of "Tonight Show" broadcasts for the first time since the week ending December 2, 2005 (the week Oprah Winfrey appeared on LATE SHOW). 

IFC has a new series coming up called "Modern Toss," which is a collection of blink-and-you'll-miss-them gags, created by Mick Bunnage and Jon Link, done using both animation and live action (and in some cases blending the two).

Like a lot of what's in latenight these days (the series will air at 11 p.m. starting March 17), it's virtually impossible to review. Some of the bits are kind of funny, most of them aren't, and the prevailing attitude seems to be that if you don't like one of them, another will be along directly. Current TV, meanwhile, has its own Flash-animated sketch show, "SuperNews," premiering later the same week, on March 20.

"Modern Toss" -- a British import -- and much of what's on Current reflects the YouTube-ization of television, along with Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" lineup, the VH1-Jack Black experiment "Acceptable TV" (which featured user-generated content), and assorted entries on Comedy Central. Under this philosophy, the goal is to serve up inexpensive material in bite-sized bursts, for an audience with a gnat-sized attention span.

That isn't to say that there's no place for sketch comedy, but reducing your programming to what approximates a series of rapid-fire sight gags -- thanks to the fact that Flash animation is so relatively cheap that a chimp could do it -- sounds more like throwing in the towel than being genuinely inventive.

If TV comedy wants to hang on to its audience, the longterm challenge remains to develop half-hours (or even hours) that will hold viewers for their duration. Creating shows consisting of 40-second gags will surely provide fodder for web tie-ins but ultimately seems to exacerbate the problem more than solve it, since such content is just as easily consumed between tasks at work, leaving the producers still struggling to make a dime off it.

"Modern Toss" refers to itself as "a state of excellence in a world gone tits up," which is delightfully British, but not entirely accurate. Actually, I'd call it another dollop of generally uninspired silliness, in a comedy world where silliness is always welcome but which is still desperately in need of more genuine inspiration.