Once she’s offstage, she finds that Hugo was lurking in the hallway, reliving his own early days on the stand-up circuit.

On the day the very last episode of “Stay Up with Hugo Best” is taped, June escapes the after-work employee party and goes to a run-down comedy club to perform a set for a nearly-empty room. In the massive ecosystem that is a late night talk show, June is a nobody, an aspiring stand-up comic who has to keep moving around New York as her neighborhoods become gentrified (and thus unaffordable for someone earning poverty wages). 29-year-old June Bloom, who grew up idolizing Hugo, is a writers’ assistant on the show, having worked her way up from page. Hugo Best was once America’s hippest, most popular talk show host, but at the age of 65 (well, 68 if you happen to glimpse his driver’s license), the network is pushing him out and replacing him with a younger man.

Combined with my longstanding interest in late-night TV talk shows-I’ve kept up a website about them since the prehistoric days of the Internet-I’m basically the target audience for Stay Up with Hugo Best, which features a character who is 2/3 David Letterman, 1/3 Jay Leno. One of my favorite genres is the celebrity roman à clef, in which a writer creates fictional characters who are obviously based on real-life famous people.

Erin somers