The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy

By Bill Carter. Viking Adult, 2010. 416 pages.

Theater book, this? Well, it is when you read between the lines. For all its arguing about the natural talents of Leno, O’Brien, Letterman and other celebrities who cajole you to stay up past your bedtime, the real truth I took away from this book is that talk shows are barely about “talk” anymore, and yet to produce anything grander on a daily basis is foolhardy. There’s lots of pontificating about time slots and egos, but Carter doesn’t emphasize enough the fact that the real problems with O’Brien’s Tonight Show and Leno’s prime time show was quality control. Neither host, it seemed—and more crucially, their producers and writers—grasped the amount of effort it would require to both pacify their loyal fans and create whole legions of new ones. Both assumed that prepared filmed comedy routines would do the trick, but producing scripted material on that schedule is calamitous.

Carter’s book is overly concerned with listing every conceivable argument for every decision made, whether corporate or personal. The justifications begin to jostle and openly contradict each other, and the narrative loses focus. But there are some fascinating insights nonetheless. I never suspected, for instance, that in his early days of Late Night, Conan O’Brien actually had a cohesive plan and tone he was trying to implement—”Silliness” as a needed alternative to the increasingly stentorian old-school stances of Leno and Letterman. O’Brien’s the one who really upped the need for prepared comedy sketches in a talk show, since he never really excelled as an interviewer and had made his name mostly as a writer.

I wish Carter would have gone further down this path. He does note how overpreparedness can spoil the spontaneity which late night viewers expect. Letterman apparently tapes his Friday episodes back-to-back with his Monday ones so he can have long weekends—viewers have detected the lack of immediacy on those nights and the Friday ratings are appreciably lower than that of the fresher Thursday shows.

But I do realize that I can advance my own theories only so far before they fall apart. Early late night TV in the 1950s and ’60s was the province of inventive and instinctive comedians such as Groucho Marx, Ernie Kovacs and Steve Allen, who filled 90 minutes a night and rarely went into reruns or vacations.

This is definitely a sensitive equation, mucked up in the modern era by marketing and demographics which have turned what was once a method of keeping the network lights on a couple hours longer and milking a few more advertisers into a much-hyped, intensely scrutinized industry of its own with its own territorial superstars.

Take these entertainers out of their comfort zones and they’re like Howard Cosell when he was picked to become the new Ed Sullivan and host his own weekend variety show. Taking your natural charisma and improvisational skills and adapting them to something more formalized and commercialized takes time, and is fraught with danger. The Late Night debacle wasn’t a war, or a tactical programming error. It was an out-of-town try-out or shakedown writ large, and it couldn’t hit the marks.