Listening to the WTF podcast obsessively has led me to a number of other obsessions (why isn’t anyone else listening to this yet so I can talk to people about it?!). I was vaguely aware of the Conan/Jay Leno Tonight show debacle when it was going on but I have never consistently watched either of those shows so it wasn’t really something I thought much about. During the episode with Conan, they talked about how he first got into late night and how hurt he was by the whole scene with NBC. He mentioned that many people in his family had read The War for Late Night to understand what he was going through but that since he lived it, he never wanted to read the book.
The War for Late Night reads like a thriller. Bill Carter recounts everything that has happened in late night television worth talking about since David Letterman went to CBS and Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson (this story was the focus of his previous book The Late Shift). The book gives background on all the current hosts of late night television (Conan, Jay, Dave, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Chelsea Handler) and details all of the behind the scenes events that were happening as the major networks tried to build or maintain late night franchises. Even though you know how the story ends, the details behind it are fascinating. It is easy to forget that television is a business and that even though you might be attached to a show if it isn’t pulling in the right number and type of viewers it will be cancelled, just like a product that isn’t selling well. It’s worth noting that Bill Carter writes like a journalist, with no one person shown as the bad guy and everyone’s motivations carefully examined.
If you want to know more about the fallout from the war for late night check out The Onion A.V Club’s examination of Conan O’Brien’s new TBS show, the documentary of his post-Tonight Show tour and The War for Late Night.
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