When I read Bill Carter’s The Late Shift, about the battle over succeeding Johnny Carson as the host of The Tonight Show, I was reading about events that took place when I was seven years old and not, obviously, a viewer of late night television. Though I had heard the broad strokes of the story of Leno and Letterman, there was a lot of info I was unfamiliar with. The War for Late Night, on the other hand, covers events that took place in my […]

The other day James Corden announced he would be leaving his CBS late night show in a year’s time. Online the news was met with a lot of jokes and rehashing of Corden’s supposed personality flaws but it wasn’t met with a lot of interest or speculation. And while there would be a bit more hoopla if one of the trio of 11:30 hosts left their chair, it still wouldn’t hold a candle to what happened thirty years ago when Johnny Carson retired. Carson had […]