If this hasn’t been posted yet (I skimmed), it is worth a read. Limited gift link.
Personally, I stoped watching late night TV even though I like Colbert.
You didn’t actually watch the announcement, did you? It’s in the first 15 seconds. “I just found out last night”
Which was consistent with the news stories about it yesterday, which all indicated that Colbert was informed of the decision on Wednesday night.
Yes, which makes the timeline
- He calls Paramount out for making a $16 million dollar bribe to TFG
- Paramount cancels his show
This isn’t something that Paramount had been planning for a long time and informed him about beforehand, which is what I was responding to.
His impersonation of trump was infuriatingly shitty. He must’ve thought that was half the humor. I can do a better trump than Colbert, and God knows I’m no comedian.
Again, I’m sure at least some of the decision was political. But at the same time, the entire company has been making bad business decisions for years.
Could it have been part of the tribute deal to the Mad Orange King?
The comedians doing Trump aren’t going for accuracy. They’re going for mockery.
The Daily Show and South Park are the only things shoring up Comedy Central (and I daresay Stone and Parker are at least as virulent critics of Trump as Stewart et al). Cutting either one of those is essentially dismantling that entire channel, which is honestly long overdue. As for network television ‘late night’ talk shows their audiences skew over sixty because anybody else is watching clips online rather than scheduling their life around an 11:30 time slot. I don’t doubt that the motivation behind cutting Colbert is some combination of malice and performative capitulation to the Trump regime, but it is also frankly long overdue that there be a reckoning of the inherent unprofitability of ‘network television’.
Colbert, the Daily Show crew, Kimmel (if he wants to), et cetera can all migrate to online platforms which, if not as lucrative also don’t have the massive overhead and corporate pressures of network television, and it isn’t as if these formats have or need massive budgets anyway. Craig Ferguson went on for years with a tiny studio, a robotic skeleton, and an ability to flit with anyone on what is basically the catering budget for a CW superhero show. Lonnie Donnigan can continue to hold the fort on NBC, cracking himself up over unfunny ‘jokes’ until ‘broadcast’ television networks fold completely, five minutes before an enormous, global heating-induced firestorm consumes the entire West Coast.
Stranger
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As for network television ‘late night’ talk shows their audiences skew over sixty because anybody else is watching clips online rather than scheduling their life around an 11:30 time slot.
I keep hearing that, but we are well over 60 and never watch any of those shows “live” at their scheduled broadcast time. We watch the Kimmel and Colbert monologs and Meyers “A Closer Look” the next day on YouTube. (Never watch Fallon. I just don’t like him.) We rarely watch the guest portions of any of those shows. Most of the guests are unknown to us and are of no interest. We don’t have cable so we do the same with “The Daily Show,” because we enjoy John Stewart and all the rest of the TDS hosts.
My point is, it isn’t just young viewers who are time-shifting the late night shows or just watching certain segments. I can’t imagine anyone my age staying up to watch any of them, and I can’t understand why the Big 3 networks haven’t found a way to monetize today’s viewing habits.
We don’t watch any regular network TV shows, with the exception of SNL, which we also watch on YouTube, but only the opening sketch and Weekend Update.
The Big 3 networks were created and run by people with a passion for broadcasting. Sarnoff at NBC, Goldenson at ABC and Paley at CBS. They all had their flaws, of course. Now they’re just owned by bean counters.
Or maybe they have, but they find it’s not on the scale they find worth their while.
“Skew over sixty” does not mean “all viewers of these shows over age sixty only watch these shows on linear TV,” nor “no one who watches clips from these shows online are 60 or older,” of course. It simply means a tendency, not an absolute.
But, the reality is that the large majority of the linear TV audiences for all of these shows are, indeed, older. Using the numbers from the Latenighter article to which I linked earlier, 91% of the viewers of Colbert’s show on live TV are age 50+ (they do not give the data to break this out for 60+). Kimmel’s linear audience doesn’t skew quite so old, but it’s still 88% age 50+.
I am hearing the term “linear TV” for the first time around this story. Does that just mean watching the show as broadcast, whether over the air, on cable, or via stream? So watching time shifted (virtual DVR) on say DirecTV Stream is still linear TV?
Mostly correct. Linear TV is programming which comes to your TV in a “linear” fashion (i.e., at a certain time, on a certain channel), including over-the-air, cable, and satellite. Streaming (i.e., YouTube, Netflix, etc.) is not linear TV.
Correct. Programming which you recorded on your DVR when it was “live,” and watch later, is still linear. However, the Nielsen ratings for TV shows primarily look at live viewership, and not time-shifted viewership; when you see news articles on the ratings for a particular show, those numbers are solely live, linear viewership.
By the way, one issue is that of the big entertainment companies, Paramount (market cap of nine billion) is among the smallest and weakest. It’s certainly the smallest company holding one of the broadcast networks, with Disney (market cap of 218 billion) owning ABC and Comcast (market cap of 129 billion) owning NBC.
Since I’ve read multiple articles on this story I can’t remember which one talked about this. Basically Colbert has a slight edge in live viewership over the other two but he also has the smallest digital footprint by far.
Revenue has fallen. I’ve seen quoted a 50% drop since 2018 for late night as a whole. Colbert isn’t bringing in any revenue from alternate streams. The show is very expensive to produce. It being the only talk show that requires upkeep on a large theater doesn’t help. The current quote going around says the network is losing $40 million a year on the show. That’s untenable for any show. It’s particularly bad when you are trying to show your new possible owners that you are responsible. Throw in the Trump stuff and it’s surprising that it will still be on for a while.
They do, to a certain extent. The big three networks post clips from the late night shows on YouTube or social media sites and also make them available on the streaming services. I think the reason they don’t do that as much is that the revenues are minimal, although I think they do want clips that go viral.
So when I watch the DVR of “Last Week Tonight” I am watching linearly, but when I watch it on HBO Max it’s not? “Linear TV” just seems like another way of saying “OK boomer.”
Correct.
Kinda-sorta. It is the industry term which is used to differentiate the more traditional TV systems from on-demand streaming services. But, yes, as time goes on, the demographics of people who are still using linear TV services skews increasingly older.
In addition to all the other reasons mentioned for the fall in popularity of late-night talk shows, there’s the irritation of incessant commercials. It’s one of the reasons I very rarely watch commercial TV in the first place, but these late-night shows are a particularly bad combination of lots of commercials and low content quality.
I would imagine that late-night commercial slots are a lot cheaper than prime time, but the overhead is still significant, including the outrageous salaries of the hosts. Jay Leno at one point was reported to be earning as much as $30 million a year as host of the Tonight Show, which was cut in 2012 to between $15 and $20 million as part of the network’s effort to reduce overhead. When a show is nearly half commercials and the other half mostly bad jokes and lame interviews, it’s no wonder viewership is falling.