In the new documentary Lorne, a memorable scene sees Lorne Michaels, the Saturday Night Live creator and king of comedy, joining his friend Steve Martin for dinner at Orso in Manhattan.
Over the meal, all caught on camera by documentarian Morgan Neville and his team, Martin presses Michaels on whether he will ever actually retire from SNL. Michaels suggests that, whatever his desires may be, he can’t. To protect SNL, and all of its absurd “wasteful” use of resources, he needs to stick around.
Once Michaels is gone, all bets are off.
Michaels, of course, rules NBC’s late night lineup. He still runs SNL, and oversees both The Tonight Show and Late Night. The doc shows Michaels in prime form, taking an active role across every aspect of the show, munching on popcorn along the way (that popcorn budget may be the first thing to go).
He is, in many ways, the last man standing in late night TV: CBS got out of the game, renting the hour to Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed after canceling both The Late Show and Late Late Show. Stephen Colbert accepted an Emmy Award this week in recognition of his show’s final season.
Jimmy Kimmel will get his own shot at a farewell Emmy sooner rather than later, even if it is unlikely to happen next year, or even the year after.
Last week, the New York Post’s Page Six reported that Kimmel’s show was going to end next year, as his contract would not be extended. ABC denied it at the time. Later in the week, Puck filled in some of those gaps: Kimmel and ABC were in fact in talks for another one-year contract extension … but the network wants pretty serious budget cuts, to the tune of 20 percent or so.
Page Six, in other words, was wrong. ABC and Kimmel are in talks for another season, but there can be no assurances that they will come to a deal.
The budget cuts are a grim reality of late night. Even NBC’s Tonight Show and Late Night have had them, cutting days of production (on The Tonight Show), the house band (on Late Night) and other elements of their formats. Kimmel and ABC are likely to figure out a deal, be it pay cuts, staff reductions, fewer episodes or some combination thereof, but the cuts can only delay the inevitable.
Even Kimmel’s latest deal, a one-year extension, acknowledges the current moment. One-year deals give ABC and Kimmel optionality, as soon as either side chooses to act on it. Such a deal would have been unheard of a decade ago. The fact that it came amid an FCC-driven war against ABC only heightens the pressure.
Advertising revenue on late night has fallen by 50 percent since 2018 and continues to fall at a rapid clip, according to the media-tracking firm Guideline. Revenue from digital platforms is not making up for it.
Ratings are OK, with Kimmel averaging north of 2.7 million viewers in Q2, benefiting from the end of The Late Show, while The Tonight Show averaged 1.4 million, also up compared with the previous year. Late Night averaged 974,000 viewers, while The Daily Show averaged 1.2 million. Millions still watch these shows on TV, even if they are a shell of their former selves, when Jay Leno averaged north of 5 million viewers every night and when David Letterman could reliably draw north of 4 million a night.
Last Week Tonight is once a week in a given season. The Daily Show has Jon Stewart on similarly short-term deals; SNL will, as Michaels surely knows, undergo a dramatic transformation when he is gone. He may very well be the protector of The Tonight Show and Late Night, too.
What we know of as late night won’t vanish, of course. It’s just that the juice has left broadcast and cable TV and shifted to places like YouTube, which come across as less filtered and censored, where the comedian or host can say what they want and do what they want, network censor be damned.
Conan O’Brien, in hindsight, left TV just in time. His TBS show underwent substantial budget cuts, and eventually he decided to step aside altogether. His podcast empire, however, has more views than the TBS show ever did, even if his cultural relevance when he was at NBC may have been higher.
But it was his appearance on the YouTube talk show Hot Ones that really opened his eyes to the reality of late night’s decline.
“That was the moment the scales fell from my eyes,” O’Brien told THR earlier this year. “If a guy can do World Series numbers with overhead that looked, to me, to be about $600, and you have every big star lining up to do his show or Chicken Shop Date … that’s when I profoundly understood that late night shows are in trouble.”
Indeed, a new generation of talk show talent is already creating quality shows on YouTube and TikTok, and late night veterans are eagerly joining them. As YouTube CEO Neal Mohan explained it last year, late night TV “gets reconstituted in your feed, which is a personalized set of preferences in terms of what speaks to you around that particular format, whether it’s the monologue, whether it’s the sketch, whether it’s what Brittany [Broski] does in terms of the conversation,” Mohan says.
YouTube is also happy to have legacy talent in its house too, just like O’Brien. It’s a safe bet that Colbert, Kimmel and others will eventually have their own presence there, just like their shows do. And brands like The Tonight Show could, one imagines, simply migrate there, keeping the brand alive regardless of what happens to the network TV time period. The shows already have huge audiences there; why not keep them around? It may not pay the bills for a Manhattan studio and a crew north of 100 people, but there’s no reason that these pieces of TV history need to vanish altogether.
The days of networks spending $100 million-plus on late night TV are nearing the end. It may not end this year or next year, but it is on the horizon. Kimmel and Stewart may stick around a bit longer, NBC’s shows too, but the inevitable is coming, whether they are eager to admit it or not. Wasteful shows can survive when the creator is untouchable, but once that baton has been passed, waste won’t fly.
The good news? Fresh, exciting and original programming will be born online when they do pack it in.
And as anyone prowling YouTube for original comedy knows, that next generation of “late night TV” is already forming; it just might not be late at night, or on TV.
“Why would I watch? Five white guys, I mean, talk about the most stale environment,” former late night host Chelsea Handler said last week at a live taping of Malcolm Gladwell and Kenya Barris’ The Unusual Suspects podcast at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre, when asked if she still watches late night TV (the episode will premiere Oct. 29). “You know, some of these guys are my friends, but … it’s so anachronistic. It’s so antiquated. Who is tuning in, and you’re watching clips? Of course, you know, if you’re online, it’s so stale.”