It was once reported of the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson that “he hath consumed a whole night lying looking at his great toe, about which he hath seen Tartars and Turks, Romans and Carthaginians, fight in his imagination.” Alas for my poor imagination: all I see at night in the void around my feet are Jay and Dave engaged in their spectral skirmishing. I don’t even have the slightest idea what they’re fighting about, any more than I did back at school, when my history teacher kept trying to drum into my head whatever the hell was up with Carthage.
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Kushnick’s brief run as executive producer of the Tonight show the most spectacular part of Carter’s story, plays like a sitcom version of Blade Runner, in which the network’s upper-echelon replicants are hilariously befuddled by human irrationality. From her first day on the job Kushnick makes wildly unreasonable demands of the network and goes ballistic when she’s refused. No one attempts to fathom her behavior; it’s just one of those human things that replicants weren’t programmed to understand. After one particularly apocalyptic tantrum a delegation of NBC executives finally shows up at Jay’s house to tell him to get rid of her. They scrounge around desperately for some human construct that would keep them from looking like villains and at the same time prevent Jay from following her out the door. Here’s what they hit upon: they tell him they’re “staging an intervention” to “break his addiction” to Kushnick. Jay, understandably, has no idea what they’re talking about. Instead, he does everything short of sending up smoke signals to convey (without actually saying the words and lousing up his image as a nice guy) that as far as he was concerned, if he still had his own job, he doesn’t give a shit what happens to his producer/mentor/number one fan. Now that’s comedy: the droids struggling to connect on a human level, any human level, and the human being turning out to be more casually cold-blooded than the droids can comprehend. I can’t wait to see how it plays in the movie.
You think I’m joking. HBO has bought the rights to The Late Shift. Kathy Bates will reprise her ax-wielding-lunatic act from Misery as Kushnick, and Betty Thomas, fresh from The Brady Bunch Movie, will direct. Clearly HBO sees it as the perfect successor to Barbarians at the Gate, their jauntily cynical and unfunny true-life docusatire about the RJR Nabisco buyout. And why not, really? Barbarians at the Gate tried to pretend there was something wickedly humorous about bond offerings; so what if the dramatic climax of The Late Shift is Letterman and CBS negotiating about profit participation and affiliate clearances? Add enough high-spirited music, and the audience may get so giddy they won’t notice that the inner workings of show business are about as interesting as real estate tax law.
I can’t blame Carter for preferring a more colorful fairy tale. And surely he’s right about one thing: there’s something unfathomably creepy about Leno. Reading The Late Shift’s unrelenting accumulation of nasty gossip about his limitations as a performer and a human being–or watching that awful show of his–you can’t help but wonder what he’s doing on the air at all. Ultimately you have to start looking for explanations in the realm of myth: perhaps even the one Carter helpfully supplies in his epilogue, when describes Leno as “risen back up, zombie-like, from the competitive dead.”
Switching over to Leno sometimes comes as a relief: you know he doesn’t give a damn how well his show is going. He will plow through every bit, no matter how feeble, in listless obedience to the script. As Carter tells it, it’s just not in Leno’s character to challenge anything, no matter how miserable his oppression. He has spent his TV career steadfastly refusing to stand up for himself, either to the monstrous Kushnick or to the hordes of NBC droids who now run his program for him. The most bloodcurdling anecdotes in The Late Shift concern Leno’s casual willingness to wreck some of his oldest friendships rather than disagree with Kushnick over some trivial issue where she was blatantly in the wrong. And yet when NBC canned her he obliterated her presence in his life with remorseless, old-style Soviet thoroughness. He even tells Carter proudly that he now has extracted a guarantee from NBC that the Tonight shows Kushnick produced will never be rerun.
