Worldwide Pants
television production company founded by David Letterman
Worldwide Pants Incorporated is an American television and film production company founded and owned by comedian and talk show host David Letterman.
The company was formerly headquartered at the Ed Sullivan Theater building in New York City but has since moved to Los Angeles following the ending of the Late Show with David Letterman. The president and CEO is former Late Show executive producer Rob Burnett. Peter Lassally, a former The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and Late Show executive producer, was the senior vice-president until his retirement.
History
1990s
A predecessor company, Space Age Meats, produced Letterman's first television talk show, The David Letterman Show in 1980. This company was also credited with producing Late Night with David Letterman, produced in partnership with NBC and Johnny Carson's Carson Productions from 1982 to 1990. Carson continued to be credited with production of that show until his retirement in 1992. The predecessor company also signed a deal with Walt Disney Studios for feature films.
Worldwide Pants' first production credit was for Late Night in 1991, shortly after its formation. The company, then known as Worldwide Pants Productions, shared a 1991 Peabody Award, for their ability to "take one of TV's most conventional and least inventive forms—the talk show—and infuse it with freshness and imagination."
In 1993, the company produced two shows: one was the sitcom The Building, starring Bonnie Hunt, and the other was the new late night program Late Show with David Letterman, both on CBS. Although the former flopped, the latter succeeded for a 22-year run until 2015.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1803714. VIAF identifies the subject as 135171471. The Library of Congress control number is no96016860. 1 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1980, 1982, 1990 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “Worldwide Pants” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.