Commentary

Exiting Late-Night Talk Shows? Young TV Brands Have Options

• by Wayne Friedman , Staff Writer, August 14, 2024

The clock seems to be ticking for NBC’s “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon,” CBS’ “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”

Changes in network late-night TV are coming. But don’t count on the same remedy for scripted and unscripted programming on live, linear TV prime-time moving to streaming platforms.

Now it seems that live -- or near-live weekday -- comedy-infused, late-night network talk-show programming might have been somewhat immune from being de-emphasized in the growing world of connected TV (CTV) content, where on-demand programming is everything.

Late-night network talk-show programming doesn’t have to be all that -- but still mostly relevant on a daily news timely basis, via hosts' comedic spin on politics and current news stories.

Jimmy Kimmel, host of  “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” sums this up on the recent Politickin' podcast:

“I don’t know if there will be any late-night television shows on network TV in ten years. Maybe there’ll be one, but there won’t be a lot of them. There’s a lot to watch and now people can watch anything at any time. They’ve got all these streaming services.”

This comes as Kimmel just signed a new three-year deal.

Although viewership of late-night talk shows has slowly receded, they have been helped by digital video online exposure of hosts’ monologues appearing on YouTube, Facebook and other digital destinations.

At the same time, many fringe broadcast late-night shows have disappeared. CBS’ “The Late Late Show with James Corden," NBC’s “Last Call with Carson Daly” and "A Little Late with Lilly Singh” have also gone away.

Cable TV late-night talk shows that have ended include “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee” (in 2022) and “Conan” (in 2021), both on TBS.

It’s not as if these shows -- and hosts -- haven't had a great run. 

Kimmel has been doing it for 21 years. Jay Leno on “Tonight” had a 17-year stint. David Letterman on “The Late Show” had a 22-year run with 11 years on NBC’s “Late Night.” 

Conan O’Brien appeared for 16 years on “Late Night With Conan O’Brian, and a brief four-month run on “Tonight” in 2009 and 2010. On TBS, “Conan” lasted for 11 years.

Johnny Carson remains the longtime champ on “The Tonight Show” -- with a run of 30 years. 

In some ways the internet may be keeping some of these remaining shows around -- perhaps longer than they should have been, at least from a marketing perspective. But there is also a downside.

Kimmel said: “Maybe more significantly, the fact that people are easily able to watch your monologue online the next day, it really cancels out the need to watch it when it’s on the air... Once people stop watching it when it’s on the air, networks are going to stop paying for it to be made.”

So figuring out that networks have already done the advertising math, why keep them around now?

In the recent past, those late-night shows were a way to attract younger-skewing advertisers to network TV -- which helps when the median age for broadcast TV is well above 60 years. 

Who really wants to give that up? Of course, nowadays, young media users have much more diverse digital platforms to get their comedy and entertainment.

And perhaps more trouble down the road -- they may not even want to listen to anyone’s current news comic monologue spin as well