MagneticMediaFed

Am I the only person who isn’t particularly offended by the news Jimmy Fallon will be taking over Late Night next summer? This isn’t to say I’ll be watching, but as a strategic move in chess game of late night programming, it makes perfect sense. Let us not forget the genre is clearly in its waning years. Really, network television, like newspapers, aren’t a particularly sound investment right now. That being said, the transition from where we are now to where we will eventually be isn’t going to be immediate, and frankly, we probably won’t see it happening. One day we’ll just wake up, go to work, stumble over to the water cooler and say to whomever is standing there, “Hey, did you watch Letterman last night?” To which they will undoubtedly respond, “What’s a letterman?” And then you will realize that they don’t even have televisions at the nursing home and that you haven’t gone to work in 23 years. More after the jump…

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First of all, I do read books. I’ve read many books. Some, in fact, aren’t even about television. Last week I finally got around to reading Bill Carter’s The Late Shift. Why I hadn’t read this book is a mystery to me as “Late Night” shows are one of my favorite kinds of programming– they’re, in a way, the last remaining installations of television’s golden era.

The Late Shift is a really good read, but its especially interesting a dozen years after the fact. Knowing the after-effects of this late-night-battle makes for a delightful bit of history-via-Miss Cleo. Also interesting was finishing up Carter’s book right around the same time I heard this fascinating follow-up to a recurring story on WNYC’s “On the Media” detailing what Bob Garfield refers to as his “Television Chaos Theory.” These seemingly unrelated areas, “Absolte Chaos” and “Late Night,” might not be all that far apart. Their inevitable collision could equate to CERTAIN DISASTER (a gorey tragedy for those who take television history a least half seriously, though great fodder for television and technology bloggers). Keep reading after the jump…

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