Leno, a deliberately unsentimental man who never took vacations and “lived to tell jokes at 11:30”, felt he was being forced to abandon the job he loved in order to placate a younger employee. In a sense, the two comedians became stand-ins for broader generational grievances. And while Leno became a national punching bag as the entire enterprise quickly unraveled, Carter fairly presents both sides of the story. Their solution - giving Jay a prime-time show at 10:00 while still handing over The Tonight Show to Conan - was a too-clever by half maneuver to get out of what they repeatedly called “a Sophie’s choice”. In 2009, they worried that competing with Leno would strangle Conan’s Tonight Show in its infancy.

In 2004, they worried that competing with Conan at 11:35 would siphon off younger viewers. Throughout the entire process, NBC was single-mindedly focused on protecting The Tonight Show, one of the only profit centers for a network mired in last place. However, he had no interest in another messy succession conflict that would harm his public reputation, so he reluctantly agreed to the handover. Meanwhile, Leno, the current host, was still the undisputed king of late night. NBC, not wanting to lose a star they had cultivated for more than a decade, persuaded him to stay by promising him The Tonight Show in five years. In 2004, after a breakthrough performance as the host of the Emmys the year before, Conan was one of the hottest names in show business. As a result, he’s able to give the reader a relatively unfiltered look into the minds of Conan O’Brien, Leno and all the NBC executives involved in the six-year soap opera. But the story it covers, and the characters involved, are so engrossing that his 406-page minute-by-minute dissection of the battle over hosting The Tonight Show never drags.Ĭarter, who covered the struggle between Jay Leno and David Letterman to succeed Johnny Carson in 1994’s The Late Shift, received an unprecedented amount of access for his latest book. The broad outlines of Bill Carter’s The War for Late Night are familiar to almost anyone with a passing knowledge of American popular culture.

The war for late night by bill carter