Remembering The Late Shift, The 1996 Made-For-TV Movie That Immortalized
...The Late Night Wars
http://uproxx.com/tv/the-late-shift-letterman-leno/
When I was growing up in the early ’90s, I was obsessed with a lot of things that now seem a little silly: grunge, NFL passing statistics, Elle MacPherson, Total Recall. But by far the silliest, and hardest to fathom, was my intense interest in the late-night wars waged by David Letterman and Jay Leno over The Tonight Show.share
How this inside-baseball story spilled over into the tabloids and Bill Carter’s 1994 bestseller The Late Shift — and even spawned a sequel decades later starring Conan O’Brien — stills boggles the mind. Looking back, what should’ve been obvious all along now can’t be denied: This was an argument by millionaire entertainers over a time slot. A time slot! Remember time slots? That was when you had to tune in to a specific over-the-air channel at a specific time of the day in order to watch a show, or else you wouldn’t be able to see it, like, ever again. Can you imagine the indignity?
Nevertheless, at the time I found the palace intrigue so fascinating that I didn’t question why, in 1996, The Late Shift was turned into a TV movie that subsequently aired on HBO and basic cable approximately one billion times for the next 20 years. Instead, I proceeded to watch The Late Shift one billion times.