Late Night Wars | The Stars Realign | 1

Business Wars

Wondery

History, Business, David Brown, Management

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2021

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The cutthroat evolution of late-night talk shows is a long and fierce battle for advertising riches, ratings and sheer egotistical triumph. It’s the early 1980s and NBC’s Tonight Show is the unbeatable standard in its class, and its long-time host Johnny Carson the indisputable god of late night.

Hosts David Letterman, Jay Leno and later Conan O’Brien all worship Carson. Each of them desperately covets the Tonight Show seat and will stop at nothing to get it.

As fickle audiences demand increasingly cutting-edge entertainment after dark, the fight to win late night will be redefined. And it will be ugly.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, prime members, you can listen to business wars, add free on Amazon music.
0:04.6	Download the app today.
0:07.0	A listener note.
0:14.4	This episode contains adult language and may not be suitable for all listeners.
0:22.7	It's January 6, 1993, the NBC Studio Backlog, Burbank, California.
0:29.2	The Tonight Show with Jay Leno is wrapping up yet another taping.
0:33.2	The audience is still going wild when the studio's back exit door opens.
0:39.4	A man steps into the dark alley and dashes through the shadows on the deserted lot to the
0:44.2	executive office building.
0:46.3	He slips into the rear entrance.
0:49.9	He sprints up the stairs to the second floor, careful not to be discovered, peaking down
0:54.9	hallways as he moves quietly toward his destination.
1:00.9	He steps into a closet, a closet with an inner office speakerphone.
1:05.6	It's located just a few feet away from the office of Warren Littlefield, NBC's head of entertainment.
1:12.0	A conference call is about to begin, and it's a call the man in the closet is not supposed
1:17.7	to hear.
1:21.4	Up executives from NBC corporate and its parent company General Electric are dialing in to
1:27.1	Littlefield's office from the annual partners meeting in Florida.
1:30.9	NBC's president and chief executive officer Bob Wright is staring the call.
1:36.8	The man in the closet crouches down in the dark.
1:40.1	His very future is at stake.
1:42.9	This meeting could change the trajectory of his career, and nobody screws with Jay Leno.
	...

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