By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Matthew Fleischer on FishbowlLA, October 2010
In late October 2010 — only ten months after Conan O’Brien had been forced off NBC’s Tonight Show by the late-night-schedule rearrangement that returned Jay Leno to the post-11 p.m. slot — New York Times television writer Bill Carter’s book The War for Late Night was published by Viking Press. Vanity Fair ran a long excerpt online. The original FishbowlLA framing flagged the rapid book-turnaround as remarkable: “Wow, that sure was fast.”
Then
The January 2010 NBC late-night reorganization had been one of the era’s most-publicly-discussed network-television controversies. NBC had moved Jay Leno to a 10 p.m. weeknight prime-time show in mid-2009; that show’s failure produced the January 2010 decision to push Leno back into the 11:35 p.m. Tonight Show slot and move O’Brien to a 12:05 a.m. start time. O’Brien refused the move and exited NBC with a $45 million payout; he started his TBS show Conan in November 2010.
Bill Carter had been the New York Times’s senior television-industry writer for years prior to War for Late Night. His earlier 1994 book The Late Shift — about the original Leno-vs.-Letterman Tonight Show succession battle following Johnny Carson — had been adapted as an HBO film in 1996. The 2010 follow-up was structured as a successor volume; the book-publishing infrastructure had been able to produce a substantial reported volume within ten months of the underlying events because Carter had been reporting the story in real time across the prior year.
The Vanity Fair excerpt that landed at the same time as the original FBLA pickup captured one of the more emotionally exposed Conan moments — the “What does Jay have on you people?” line directed at NBC executives. The original FishbowlLA framing emphasized that excerpt and pushed the larger book as worth reading in full.
The original Matthew Fleischer framing was structurally a media-business book-launch pickup. The piece treated the Carter book as a substantive piece of late-night-network-television history reporting.
Now
The Conan-vs.-Jay story has continued to be one of the most-cited contemporary television-industry case studies. Jay Leno’s second Tonight Show run continued until February 2014, when Jimmy Fallon took over the show. Leno has continued in stand-up touring, his automotive-content franchise Jay Leno’s Garage, and occasional broadcast work across the years.
Conan O’Brien’s TBS Conan show ran until 2021, when he transitioned to streaming-only podcast and HBO Max projects. His Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend podcast has been one of the most-listened celebrity-interview podcasts in the post-2018 streaming-audio era. The broader career-pivot from late-night-network-television to podcast-and-streaming has been one of the more substantive late-night-host career transitions of the past decade.
Bill Carter has continued in television-business writing across the years since. His 2017 book Desperate Networks (a follow-up to his earlier 1991 book of the same name) and his subsequent CNN media-reporter work have continued the long-form television-industry coverage register he had built across decades.
NBC’s Tonight Show has continued under Jimmy Fallon. The broader late-night-network-television category has been substantially destabilized across the streaming era — the dispersal of late-night audiences across YouTube, podcasts, and direct-streaming platforms has substantially reduced the cultural centrality of any individual late-night show relative to the 2010-era moment that produced Carter’s book.
The 2010 piece reads now as a small documented moment of media-business book-publishing operating at the cycle’s outer speed — a substantive Carter volume on the network-television-industry story landing within ten months of the underlying events. The kind of rapid book-cycle the piece celebrated has substantially continued as a media-business publishing model; what has changed is the cultural footprint of the underlying network-television-industry events, which has substantially shrunk relative to the 2010-era moment.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.