The Tonight Show War

I spent a few hours a week back or so experiencing the 2010 Tonight Show conflict between Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno, and it was in many ways revealing about the ways in which TV history can be told, especially considering I had little to no awareness of what was happening at the time. The first method was via an edited compilation of TV shows that explicitly dealt with the conflict, combining various sources, while the second was the extensive Wikipedia article, itself sourced mostly from Bill Carter's The War for Late Night. As might be expected, the latter was more in depth, carrying all the behind-the-scenes meetings that the former necessarily couldn't capture. And yet, there was still a good deal of merit to the former: not only were there moments that the latter didn't include for one reason or another, but there was also an engaging aspect to simply watching it unfold visually. Moreover, despite the video's jumbled chronology, there was a sense of watching the events as they happened — aside from a few clips used throughout, all were broadcast live, and thus gave the opportunity to experience these events as they were at the time. If television is inherently transient, we have the ability nowadays through YouTube, Internet Archive, and other formats to experience that transience in a retrospective fashion.