David Letterman finally gets The Tonight Show tonight. Well, for a moment.
Letterman’s appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon tonight coincides with his former colleagues Paul Shaffer and the World’s Most Dangerous Band beginning a weeklong stint filling in for Fallon’s usual house band, The Roots, who are busy preparing for Friday night’s SNL50: The Homecoming Concert.Â
Shaffer’s group originated as the house band for Letterman’s Late Night, then accompanied the host to Late Show as The CBS Orchestra.
Although Letterman is said to have been on hand to welcome Shaffer back to late night TV, his presence on The Tonight Show is arguably the bigger headline of the night. That’s because Letterman hasn’t appeared on The Tonight Show since 1992, when the franchise was known as The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
Letterman famously defected to CBS after losing out on The Tonight Show to Jay Leno following Carson’s retirement. He never appeared on the show during either of Leno’s tenures, nor during Conan O’Brien’s brief stint.
Since his 2015: retirement, Letterman has made return visits each of his two former shows,  Late Night and The Late Show, now hosted by Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert, respectively.
Letterman isn’t the first Tonight Show ex-pat that Fallon welcomed back into the fold following a once bitter fallout. Just last year, O’Brien returned to the franchise for the first time. And when Fallon first debuted as Tonight Show host, he brought on Joan Rivers, who had been iced out of the franchise by Johnny Carson decades earlier.
At NBC they were “The World’s Most Dangerous Band.”