On February 11, 1960, the king of late-night television looked into the camera, announced he was leaving, and walked off mid-broadcast, abandoning the most profitable show on TV over a censored joke about a toilet. That stunning act of defiance captures Jack Paar, the man Time magazine said split talk show history into two eras.

This deep dive explores how a stuttering, tuberculosis-surviving high school dropout from Ohio detonated the rigid 1950s television landscape and built the blueprint for the modern talk show. We trace his fearless rise, his intimate and volatile on-air style, and the deep contradictions that make his full legacy so complicated.

• Calming a panicked nation at age 20 during Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" broadcast
• How he proved "the host is the franchise" by abandoning the show for three weeks unti ...