Do late night talk shows have a future?
A couple of decades ago the question would have been crazy, given their young audience and pop cultural relevancy. But with the world of entertainment shifting to an on-demand streaming world, late night — perhaps more than any other entertainment TV format — has struggled to adapt.
Late night, it appears, is now firmly in belt-tightening mode. Or as one veteran late night producer says, “there’s definitely a new reality when it comes to budgets.”
On Sept. 6, NBC’s long-running Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon announced plans to trim back its production schedule, airing four nights per week instead of five, swapping its Friday edition for a rerun.
The network noted that The Tonight Show was the last of the major late night shows to produce five days per week.
Earlier this year, NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers had to drop its house band as part of budget cuts. And last year CBS opted to end its Late Late Show after James Corden left, opting to replace it with the less expensive After Midnight comedy game show.
“It’s kind of surprising, because, you know, these late night variety shows were cash cows for years,” notes media analyst Brad Adgate. “They brought in a younger audience, it was relatively inexpensive to produce, and they had a bigger ad load than, say, primetime TV.”
That, in turn, meant that the margins on late night were higher than primetime. But the world has changed.
Now of course, the cultural cache is built on YouTube and TikTok, and while the shows are present there (and even quite successful on those platforms) the revenue just doesn’t line up to what they invest in the product. And the older audiences still watching linear TV just aren’t as valuable to marketers.
“The audience is getting older, and desirable viewers aren’t watching [on TV],” Adgate says. “They’re gonna watch little snippets the next day on YouTube.”
The audience for Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel has — like much of traditional TV — been on the decline for years as viewers have shifted their habits toward streaming and, specific to the late-night shows, viewing clips on YouTube and social media.
Five years ago, The Late Show finished first in total viewers among late-night talk shows with 3.81 million, to 2.44 million for The Tonight Show and 2.04 million for Jimmy Kimmel Live. In 2023-24, The Late Show remained No. 1, but with only about 2.6 million viewers — a decline of about 32 percent from 2018-19. Kimmel moved into second with 1.82 million viewers, down about 11 percent from five years earlier (having Monday Night Football as a lead-in once a week last fall helped some; the show averaged 1.77 million viewers from January to May). The Tonight Show slipped to third in viewers with 1.43 million, losing 41 percent of its 2018-19 total.
Things were no better at 12:35 a.m., where Late Night With Seth Meyers (983,000 viewers) was down by about 470,000 viewers (32 percent) from 2018-19. CBS’ After Midnight, which premiered in January, averaged about 730,000 viewers over its first five months.
Last year, Brian Stelter reported in Los Angeles magazine that CBS’ Late Late Show was losing $15 million-$20 million per year, and while Corden’s departure was a long time coming, the losses were all-but-certainly a factor in why CBS pulled the plug after he left.
“In the beginning, when James Corden asked me to be a part of it, he was envisioning doing it for only five years. We did eight and a half. So, I think he and the showrunner, Ben Winston, kind of knew, in a way, how long they would be effective,” Late Late Show bandleader Reggie Watts told The Hollywood Reporter in July. “And then there was a budget cycle that was coming up, and they knew the budget was going to be smaller, and that meant that they would’ve had to let go of a lot of crew members, and these are people that have been with the show for a long time.”
Networks have been taking a closer look at budgets, figuring out ways to cut, or other ways to justify expenses. One option: Late night hosts have always served as sort of official MCs for their respective networks, but in recent years that part of the job has expanded significantly, perhaps one reason that the shows are still on the air. Even if the TV broadcast loses money, they may be able to make up for it elsewhere.
Late night stars can host awards shows like the Emmys or Oscars, and deliver pointed barbs during corporate events like TV’s upfront week.
Many hosts, including Fallon, Kimmel and Colbert, also create and EP other programming (i.e. Fallon’s That’s My Jam, Kimmel’s Live in Front of a Studio Audience), or bring their likenesses or ideas to other lines of business. Fallon, for example, is the face of a haunted house experience called “Jimmy Fallon’s Tonightmares” that NBCUniversal is currently constructing in New York’s Rockefeller Plaza (he also has a ride at Universal Studio Orlando).
It doesn’t help that streaming platforms like Netflix and Peacock haven’t quite nailed a late night formula that clicks, though they have tried, leaning on hosts like John Mulaney and Amber Ruffin to experiment. While it is always possible that they figure it out, that is far from a sure thing.
“Late night is changing drastically and very, very rapidly,” Watts said. “The Late Late Show got out at exactly the right time – we got just a little bit past the peak, and then we were out.”
But as Meyers himself quipped at NBCUniversal’s upfront May 13 at Radio City Music Hall, there’s always room for things to get worse.
“What a joy to be back in Radio City,” Meyers told the crowd of advertisers and media buyers. “I asked an NBC executive, why do you hold upfronts here every year? And they said, ‘I like looking at the marquee and thinking, sure. It’s a tricky time for TV but it could be worse. We could be in radio.’”
