Late Night Wars: The Sequel

Vanity Fair is offering an excerpt from Bill Carter's The War for Late Night: When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy, a copy of which may be ordered via this link. A friend of mine who's read the whole book thinks Leno comes off as kind of passive and almost naïve…and certainly not as the evil plotter that some believed him to be. Against that, O'Brien comes across as a guy who shouldn't have had The Tonight Show handed to him and shouldn't have had it taken away so abruptly. Both men were harmed by some bad decisions at the NBC executive level but both men also benefited…and I'll probably write more about this after I get my copy of the book.