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The War For Late Night

post #1 of 14
10/29/10 at 6:00pm
Thread Starter 
Bill Carter's book on the Leno/Conan war with NBC comes out next Thursday! Bill Carter's books always great, as well as the fantastic The Late Shift(Which was about Leno versus Letterman), he wrote the excellent Desperate Networks.

Vanity Fair has some really interesting excerpts: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/fe...excerpt-201012
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post #2 of 14
11/4/10 at 11:53am
I'm curious to see how much of this is new material, and how much of it is repurposed from Desperate Networks. Plus, anything that makes Jeff Zucker look like the fool he is guarantees a good time.
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post #3 of 14
11/5/10 at 12:23pm
This is pretty excellent. The 2004 stuff is taken care of pretty quickly, and in more depth than in Desperate Networks. Carter's the anti-Ben Mezrich, in that he can craft an entertaining story that's actually backed up by quotes and sources. Plus, I'm learning for the first time how close Stewart came to jumping to ABC before they went with Kimmell, and how bad Jay wanted Kimmel to help him put together a late-night block if he left NBC. That should make for Kimmell's eventual slams all the more painful.
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post #4 of 14
11/5/10 at 12:33pm
Yeah, I'd like to pick up the book but I'll probably just wait until my library has it. I've already got the hold in.
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post #5 of 14
11/5/10 at 12:57pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Cameron Hughes View Post
Bill Carter's book on the Leno/Conan war with NBC comes out next Thursday! Bill Carter's books always great, as well as the fantastic The Late Shift(Which was about Leno versus Letterman), he wrote the excellent Desperate Networks.

Vanity Fair has some really interesting excerpts: http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/fe...excerpt-201012
That was a really good read.
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post #6 of 14
11/5/10 at 1:11pm
Interesting read. It kind of makes me wonder if Conan should have stuck around. Jay's 11 30 show may have died as well, or failed to get the ratings NBC wanted. If that happened, maybe they'd have wanted to give Conan a chance without the dead weight of a Leno lead in.
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post #7 of 14
11/5/10 at 4:59pm
I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on this eventually, but I still have a backlog of books to get through first. The excerpts in Vanity Fair were pretty killer.
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post #8 of 14
11/6/10 at 6:52pm
It is an excellent, entertaining, and surprisingly fair read. Not to pull a mike_tyson, but I'm writing a review of it and I'll excerpt that here.
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post #9 of 14
11/7/10 at 11:33pm
Got this yesterday and am already 4 chapters in. It was very hard to put it down before bed last night.
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post #10 of 14
11/9/10 at 12:21pm
In someways I both like and hate the mini Biographys of ALL the players save for Letterman (so far) that are weaved in. On one hand I like some of the background on the other do I really need to know that Jimmy Kimmel once had a David Letterman Birthday cake.
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post #11 of 14
11/11/10 at 11:07am
I think it goes to show, that while he currently holds a weird, between Conan and Leno place on the television spectrum, for all the talk of Carson as the inspiration and idol of television variety shows, Letterman really holds that spot.

Listening to Carter discuss the book with Bill Simmons on his podcast, I wonder if Letterman has picked Colbert to hand the show off to in a couple of years.
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post #12 of 14
11/11/10 at 2:04pm
One thing that is really grabbing me is how everyone thought Conan was dumbing down himself on the Tonight Show (and to an extent he was) but he was fighiting alot of what the network wanted. Especially the notes from Ebersol...that guy comes off as a gigantic douche and was really obsessed with that Johnny Carson anicdote. The show could have been alot worse than what it was.
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post #13 of 14
11/29/10 at 1:35pm
Most of the way through, but I am most shocked by Carter putting the blinders on for Leno's conduct.

But Ebersol is some sort of black hole of great comedy.
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post #14 of 14
2/14/11 at 9:00am

Just finished this last night.  What this book really drove home for me is that as far as Leno is concerned, it's not really "The Tonight Show" specifically that means so much to him- the guests, the musical acts, and the whole spectacle of it all is really the icing on the cake of just having a daily grind that he can obsess over.  Obsessing over the monologues and the ratings are the only things that really matter.  He doesn't listen to interviews, and the Jimmy Kimmel 10 questions hot seat really illustrated that he just drives bits.  NBC's obsession with thinking he'd go to another network bordered on irrational- he'd probably be just as happy with a permanent gig at a Vegas casino as long as he still got to "tell jokes at night".

 

I was also surprised either at how little detail he gathered on Conan's actual reactions or how introverted Conan is in terms of how he reacted to the whole situation.  Most of his quotes are fairly short and there didn't seem to be as much character detail into Conan as a person beyond his past biography.

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