Late Show and Tonight Show: Getting technical

Two questions: Why do they both begin at 11:35 (at least in my part of the universe), and why are they 62 minutes long?

If your location is like mine, local news expanded to 35 minutes on the NBC and CBS affiliates. Whether that was before or after the 11:35 (10:35 here) start time for the late night shows, I can’t recall.

As for 62 minutes, not a clue. I usually switch off Letterman after the last main guest and before the “music” guest since that segment is better than 80% commercials. If I’m very bored I may try to catch Alan Kalter’s bit in there, but I doubt if I ever see the end of the show. Wait: I do recall the Worldwide Pants thing being there, but I never noted the time.

They’re probably 62 minutes long for the same reason ER is 62 minutes long: squeezing in more commercials during a higher-rated show, rather than running the spots during Conan or Kilborn for less money.

Hmmm. Interesting take, Tradnor. Hadn’t thought of that.

ER is 62 minutes long?!
Zeldar: Yup. Probably the only reason it starts at 11:35. As for the reason why news is expanded to 35 minutes, God only knows…

and yes, there must be the equivalent of 10 to 15 minutes worth of commercials per show…

Ahhh… The joys of Fast Forward in the morning!:smiley:

omni-not

Here’s a WAG based on other similar phenomena I’ve observed.

Channel A wants to get the edge on Channel B by keeping the audience for their late night offering “hooked” on their stellar news program. Thus they lengthen the news by 5 minutes.

Channel B follows suit.

In our local news arena, there’s been a race of sorts to get the “evening news” earlier and earlier in the day.

One has the slogan “First Fast Accurate” and now has news as early as 4 PM. The “Information and News Leader” followed suit so now you can have two channels with early-bird news.

Then there are the shows that actually start a minute or two before the top or bottom of the hour, ostensibly to get the jump on the competition.

It’s not like the quality of their shows might have a bearing on which one people might prefer. Just be first.

The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson was on from 11:30-12:30 for years. The network moved it back 5 minutes to make the local news 5 minutes longer. Johnny wanted the finale of his show to come on at 11:30 like it used to, but the network wouldn’t allow it.

The shows didn’t become 62 minutes until relatively recently(past 7 years or so). I guess they just want to squeeze a little more money out of 'em.

For years, the TBS superstation started everything at 5 minutes past the half hour. I believed then that the strategy was, if you didn’t like what was on some other channel, and switched over to TBS, you wouldn’t have missed anything, making the channel more attractive…

Of course, since Leno and Letterman both do this, the advantage is gone. Maybe the structure of the shows gives you 5 minutes of lame jokes to let you make up your mind which one you want to watch that night.

In any event, your local news now has five extra minutes to get advertisers to pay for you to watch crime, crime, and more crime.

And by the way, for about the last two years, IMO, ER has lasted 62 DAYS per episode…ZZZZZZZZ…

Way, way back when, the Tonight Show ran from 11:15 to 1:00. Johnny got so mad at this that he refused to appear until 11:30 and had Ed McMahon host the first fifteen minutes. NBC soon gave in.

But the answer as already correctly given is ads, ads, ads. The late night shows make fantastically huge revenues and have relatively low costs. (So Letterman earns $33 mil and Leno gets $20 mil or so. Divide that by 260 shows a year and per show they make what someone third billed on a sitcom makes.) There have been times when these shows out-earned all of prime time combined. Anything the networks can do to pull in a few more dollars will be done. That’s why ABC wanted Letterman even though he has lower ratings that Nightline. His ads go for more money.

The other reason I heard for TBS originally starting all of its TV shows at :05 or :35 was so that they would have a separate line in TV listings all to themselves since no other shows started at those times.

Now, nearly every TV listing just lumps together all the shows starting at “odd” minutes and just puts the actual starting time in parentheses.

I thought that TBS did the :05 thing because most of the other networks were in commercials at that time and TBS wanted to catch the viewers flipping around the dial.

I’m dragging this old thread out of a moth-balled closet to ask this: among my friends and family (I’m 34 years old), 95% of us work 8-4 or 9-5 jobs and go to bed somewhere in the 9:00-11:00 vicinity. The late-night talk shows always seem to be in the news, whether it be hosting wars, celebrity confessions, extravagant behavior, expressions of contrition, etc, etc. Why are these shows on so late? Who stays up til 12:30 on a weekday? In the case of Jimmy Fallon, who stays up til 1:30 on a weekday?

I realize that the 9:00 slots and the 10:00 slots are reserved more for drama and reality programming, but how would the talk shows fare if they were shown nightly at 10:00? Wouldn’t the ratings be even higher?

Being the GQ forum, let me clarify my question: what’s the logical, objective reason for airing these shows so late?

Moving to Cafe Society (which didn’t exist when this thread was started).

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

College kids, and people with DVRs who pretend to stay up that late. :slight_smile:

Not if they’re going up against scripted programming. Ask Jay Leno how 10pm worked out for him.

Kilborn, eh? This is what made me notice the olditude of this thread.

I’m in the Central Time Zone, so all the times you mention are an hour earlier for me.

Lots of people fall asleep to these shows. They watch the nightly news, then stay tuned for the Tonight Show (or whatever) and watch until they feel tired or fall asleep with the TV on.

Didn’t they try that with Leno?

Just to tie up all the loose ends here – the whole idea of a late talk/entertainment show goes back to the 1950s. An NBC programmer named Sylvester Weaver (father of Sigourney Weaver) decided that a) people wanted to watch TV before they went to bed and b) if NBC had the show they wanted to watch, people would leave their TV tuned to NBC for the next morning. The format was disposable: cheap and easy to produce, and the segments were perfect for viewers to turn it off at any commercial break without feeling they’d have to stay up.

NBC originaly started the Tonight Show at 11:15, then moved it to 11:30 because the local stations wanted more time for their newscasts. When CBS hired Letterman, many CBS affiliates weren’t even running network programming at 11:30. Part of the deal to get station clearances was that CBS would put the show on at 11:35, giving the local stations five more minutes to cram commercials into their (high-rated) local newscasts. After CBS made that deal, NBC and ABC were forced to follow suit.

Leno’s prime-time version of the talk show was originally budgeted to get something like a 1.4 rating, which is really low for prime time. The network programmers knew it would draw a smaller audience than the usual programming, but felt they could still make money. His show actually did what it was expected to, but viewers who didn’t watch Leno also didn’t come back to watch the late news or the Conan edition of Tonight, so it ended up dragging down both the network and the local stations.