"The Late Shift," New York Times TV industry reporter Bill Carter's blow-by-blow account of the fight between David Letterman and Jay Leno for Johnny Carson's vacated throne, is, if nothing else, the triumph of a species of newshound we'll call The TV Geek.

For the TV Geek (like Carter and Ken Auletta, who writes huge inside-y pieces about the media business for The New Yorker), the medium boils down to stats -- minute-by-minute Nielsen ratings, demographic breakdowns, salary tallies of stars and network executives and all that other stuff that's guaranteed to make a non-Geek's eyes glaze over. If TV were half as un-fun as the TV Geeks make it out to be, the box would've been history by now.

Carter's "Late Shift" (the 1995 paperback edition of which contains a late-breaking Jay-vs.-Dave update) is a scrupulously researched business section article pumped up to book length. Carter wins points for legwork, but his prose is a queasy combination of good gray journalism and faint stabs at "color": "Now on the freeway, Leno could feel the wind racing under the elegant canvas-cloth roof that was unfolded and attached by polished bamboo braces from just behind the backseat to the windshield of the otherwise windowless car."

In "The Late Shift," Carter's research uncovers a Leno who's an emotionally dead Robocomic and a Letterman who's a whip-smart yet monumentally insecure sad-sack. But Carter never gives us a good reason (if in fact there is one) why TV Geeks are so fixated on which of these social clods America's insomniacs like best. Carter does, however, muster a resounding editorial "Gosh!" at the way not-very-nice network execs throw around massive sums of money.

Next page: Latex chins and gapped dentures