I'm not liking CNN's The Story of Late Night for several reasons, one being that it's on CNN. CNN's programming template — cutting away from programming every few minutes for more than a few minutes of commercials — is probably okay for news coverage. A large chunk of those who watch the network are sitting in airports or bars or restaurants, kind of half-watching and waiting for a story that matters to them. But trying to follow an hour-long narrative can be maddening.
I just watched the most recent episode — titled "Leno Vs. Letterman" but as much about other hosts — and it felt like I spent more time fast-forwarding than watching The Story of Late Night. I kept thinking about all the parts of that topic's history they skipped entirely in order to plug next week's installment what seemed like twenty times. No mention of Jay's first bandleader. Scant mention of the troubles with Jay's manager serving as his first exec producer. No mention of Letterman hiring Mike Ovitz to, basically, try to get Leno fired. No mention of Letterman firing his longtime producer.
And they kind of truncated a pivotal moment in how the battle one might call "Leno Vs. Letterman" turned out. Too many people think it went like this: Jay is tailing Dave badly. Jay has Hugh Grant on and beats Dave that night. Jay then starts beating Dave every night.
It went more like this: Jay is slowly gaining on Dave and it's pretty obvious to anyone who looks at the numbers that he will soon pass Letterman. Then he has Hugh Grant on and he not only wins that night but enough people who (I guess) haven't watched Jay lately like what they see and come back the next night and the next night (etc.). So Jay starts beating Dave a month or two before it would have happened without Hugh Grant.
That's a key point. You don't have that big a shift in viewing patterns wholly because of one episode that's high on the curiosity scale. That's only good for one night.
Given the time constraints, The Story of Late Night rushed through that matter and it sounded like Hugh Grant was the only factor in how that big contest played out. (And I should say I don't mean to fault the folks who made this documentary. If any of us had done it with so little time to cover so much history, we'd have left out oodles of things that belonged in it. I'm faulting whoever decided that the entire story of late night television could be covered in six hours, let alone six hours so dense with commercials.)
Having a successful late night show involves two achievements: (1) Getting people to tune in when the show commences and (2) Keeping them watching for most of the hour. You might be able to do (1) real well but if you can't do (2), you probably don't win your time slot.
This is one of the main reasons — there were others — why it was such a bad idea to later install Leno at 10 PM with a semi-clone of The Tonight Show. Put a talk show on against an hour drama at 11:30 and the talk show would have a great chance. A lot of people wouldn't have wanted to start watching CSI Wherever at 11:35 PM because they don't want to commit to staying up until 12:35 AM to see whodunnit and if they got caught. If you tune in an hour talk show, you stick around until you lose interest. You aren't left dangling if you change the channel or hit the sack.
A prime time show competes with viewers changing the channel. A late night show competes with viewers changing the channel or (big "OR") deciding to go to bed — as everyone has to do at some point.
The story of Leno overtaking Letterman in late night is the story of how Jay got his viewers to stick around longer and how Dave's viewers began changing the channel or going to bed sooner. Even during the period when Dave was clobbering The Tonight Show in the ratings, the two shows were very competitive during their respective first acts. I dunno if testing/research showed this or if it was just an obvious-to-some assumption but the popular wisdom around NBC was that plenty of folks tuned in Jay to watch his monologue, then switched over to Dave.
So Jay lengthened the monologue. In fact, he lengthened all of Act One and inserted more comedy spots into that act and ramped up the energy of it all in a way that carried on through Act Two when he did a comedy bit like Headlines or Jaywalking, and into Act Three with his first guest and so on.
This is not something I figured out. A couple of folks laboring in the late night mines for both networks schooled me on it. One quoted to me numbers I no longer remember but they went something like this: Before Jay overtook Dave, X% of Dave's audience stayed almost to the end of the show, whereas the lower Y% of Jay's audience hung in there. When Jay pulled ahead, the numbers were almost exactly reversed.
It would be nice if someday, someone did a documentary series about late night that had time to delve into matters like this…and of course, it would be nice to have seen longer clips and longer chunks of interviews. You could easily do six hours just on Steve Allen or Jack Paar…or twelve on Johnny. I'll bet CNN already has a lot of the material you'd need to assemble such a thing.
It was odd to see that they interviewed so many people but that it doesn't seem they talked with Dave or Jay. Jay's usually a guy who's available for anything so I wonder if Dave said no, causing them to decide not to ask Jay. They did talk with Conan O'Brien so I wonder how (or if) they'll tell Jay's side of the Conan/Jay debacle. I'm of the opinion that both Leno and O'Brien were treated shabbily by their network in that mess but a lot of folks like to only focus on Conan's victimhood.