Curious Hair wrote:
I strongly recommend reading The War for Late Night, about the bungled Tonight Show handover. Same author as The Late Shift (the first bungled Tonight Show handover) and Desperate Networks (the weird post-Seinfeld era around the turn of the millennium). Leno really is a well-meaning idiot, kind of like a golden retriever. He sucks at his job, but he would always forgo representation so that he could painlessly negotiate a quick, easy, and fair contract, and he cared very much about taking care of his staff, even though, again, sucks. He also has the cultivated eccentricities of someone with way more money than he needs: he would buy denim shirts and Payless work boots in bulk because they were the only ones he liked. Contrast with Conan, who employs the most loathsome sharks in the industry (Ari Emanuel, Gavin Polone) to do all his dirty work so he can go around being America's goofy awkward redhead with no hard feelings on the surface, and whatever his own eccentricities, is not buying a Payless Shoe Source warehouse's worth of boots.
Basically, all Leno cares about is working, buying old cars, and otherwise hoarding his money. He has no kids, he hardly sees his wife. When he wasn't working on the Tonight Show, he was working in Vegas and Branson. And the work sucks! He's a weird, weird dude, but I respect the extent to which he knew his own inadequacy vis-a-vis Letterman and the rest and used his leverage to look out for his people during the 2007 strike and keep them from being put out of work in 2009 when they were still #1 in late night. The real villain is Jeff Zucker, who was so scared shitless of Conan going to ABC (he wouldn't deign to go to Fox) that he created an untenable handover situation that went on to fuck the whole network. Then he went to CNN and helped America elect Donald Trump.
And the real hero in the story, of all people, is Jerry Seinfeld, because in the epilogue, he sets out what made this whole saga so ridiculous: there's no inherent value as The Tonight Show as a franchise. It's just the name of a time slot. The show was Carson, like Letterman was his show, like Leno was his. And Conan helped make a hash of the whole thing because he thought growing up watching Carson meant he could one day inherent something that had long since ceased to exist.
Or since Books suck just watch "The Late Shift"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJ8bo5lt6G8
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