With 20-20 hindsight, the Leno-at-10 decision was not a winner, to say the least, but the attempt, we see here, was an honest effort to figure out how a network salvages one of its last successes - two talented, popular hosts who wanted the same chair - and, even more important, how to keep them from joining a rival while staunching the bleeding in the rest of your lineup.
What’s more, he sat atop a network that seemed no longer able to deliver the big hits that had been its raison d’etre for most of its existence, a condition not unique to NBC. When Conan took over Tonight Show, he inherited a property whose revenue had fallen, Carter reports, by two-thirds during the previous decade “death spiral” would be the operative term for such figures in any business other than media.
Thanks to his treatment of Conan, Jeff Zucker has joined Donald Rumsfeld and Bernie Madoff in America’s pantheon of disgraced ill-doers, while Leno drinks each night from a poisoned chalice.Ĭarter shows that while the transition was handled as ineptly as could be imagined by NBC brass, whose bottomless capacity for wishful thinking is truly impressive, the fiasco was brought on less by malice than by executives wrestling with how to manage and maintain a business in sharp decline. In that version, which has become accepted lore, the wide-eyed doe (O’Brien) was toyed with and dismissed by vulgarian NBC money-grubbers in their efforts to placate a ruthless host (Leno). At points the book goes further than all but the most committed talk-show nerds will wish to travel, like cataloging precisely where every agent and manager was when they heard the news that Leno was moving to 10 p.m., for instance.īut more important, War provides our first nonhysterical consideration of those historic days, a picture much more complicated and tragic than the morality tale that initially emerged. Much in the manner of Bob Woodward’s White House volumes, Carter brings readers into the “scenes” of the drama, taking us into the minds of most of the major players and sharing in particular a Conan’s-eye view of having the Tonight Show rug yanked out from under you. Drawing on the unparalleled access earned by his previous work, Carter captures every nook and cranny of the battle. In recent entertainment history, it is hard to think of a fracas that scorched more earth than the slow-motion jetliner crash of NBC’s Jay Leno/ Conan O’Brien fiasco.
Nowhere else in entertainment does the contest for success become such gladiatorial combat - personal, underhanded and vicious. In choosing the killing fields of late-night as his subject for two books (the first, the definitive The Late Shift, covered Leno’s ascension to Carson’s throne War is something of a sequel), Carter sows the most drama-rich soil on Earth. Jay Leno Pauses Production on 'You Bet Your Life' Amid Writers Strike
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