Worldwide Pants

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.

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 would continue to be credited with production of that show until his retirement in 1992).

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 went on to succeed for a 22-year run until 2015. In 1995, Worldwide Pants launched The Late Late Show franchise, starting with one hosted by Tom Snyder, then with Craig Kilborn, and then with Craig Ferguson. Worldwide Pants produced these Late Late Show iterations until 2015. Also that year, it teamed up with Bonnie Hunt again to start out Bonnie, which went on to last one season on the air on CBS.

In 1996, Worldwide Pants went on to greater success in primetime with the launch of Everybody Loves Raymond, which went on to be successful and critically acclaimed, went on for nine seasons. In 1997, David Kissinger, who was senior vice president of comedy and drama series department of Walt Disney Television, joined Worldwide Pants as vice president of the studio.

A 2002 Forbes article comments on the approach Letterman takes for Worldwide Pants television productions:

The company produced its first film, Strangers with Candy, a prequel to the TV show of the same name. The film premiered at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, within the "Park City at Midnight" category. Warner Independent Pictures subsequently signed up as North American distributor of the film, before ThinkFilm acquired the rights from Warner, giving it a limited release in summer 2006. The film grossed slightly more than $2 million, on a $2 million production budget and $1.5 million prints and advertising budget.