The War for Late Night_ When Leno Went Early and Television Went Crazy - Bill Carter [225]
“I really think it’s done,” said one important late-night player. “I think late night is done. Everything we know it to be is over.”
If the doomsaying sounded a bit like a demented prophet wearing a sign reading “The End Is Near,” the speaker, having made a living off late-night for two decades, had apparently legitimate evidence to justify the sentiment.
Besides the DVR, whose impact was only likely to get worse as its penetration spread from under 40 percent of households to the more than 60 percent projected for just a few years down the road, the late-night shows were also seeing their relevance undercut by hyperavailability. “YouTube is like the icing on a horrible cake,” the late-night hand-wringer said. “You always have a firm sense that if something great happens on one of these shows, you’ll see it anyway.” Recent examples included the actor Joaquin Phoenix’s apparent freak-out on Letterman or Sarah Silverman’s much-talked-about “I’m Fucking Matt Damon” music video on Kimmel’s show. Everybody was talking about those moments, the late-night veteran said, “but they’re on YouTube; why sit through the whole show to see them?”
Kimmel, for one, believed the time had come for the shows to address the threat posed by the easy availability of their best material online—an opinion he advanced even though his show generated its most buzz when its clips got passed around digitally. It especially distressed Kimmel because he was convinced his show had more impact online than anyone else’s in late night. While the response to great clips was always huge, he noted, his ratings were still challenged. Kimmel thought it might be time for the late-night shows to get together and say, “We’re not putting anything online anymore. You want to see it? You better fucking watch it.”
To many executives at the networks, taking a stand against technology didn’t seem a logical response, but threatened only to become one more way to turn late night into the equivalent of rest-home entertainment. Cutting young viewers off from their lifeline of clips of every kind, available at fingertips, would almost surely stir up some kind of organized protest and encourage them to write these network shows off as hopelessly moth-ball infested. Already NBC had begun exploring the notion that instead of selling late-night shows to advertisers on the basis of ratings for viewers between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine, it should consider raising the sales demo for late night to the group twenty-five to fifty-four, the same sales target used by—gasp—news shows, the hoariest genre in the medium.
A more reasonable response, said the longtime late-night figure, was a drastic change in how late-night shows got produced. “In a way, these shows are doomed and protected at the same time,” the player said. “They’re doomed for all these reasons; protected because what else can you put on television that’s cheaper than this? But for sure the days of the $30 million salary for a host are gone forever. The days of the twelve-, thirteen-, fourteen-person writing staff are gone forever. Frankly, the days when there are house bands might come to a close.”
The models for how to produce late-night shows for much less money were certainly out there. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert had smaller writing staffs and no house bands. Then there was Live with Regis and Kelly, ABC’s morning entry. As the late-night participant put it, “They come out. They talk. They interview guests. There’s your show. It costs a nickel.”
But would a show like that ever seize the attention of the nation, the way Letterman had during his sex scandal? Or the way Conan had after he told the people of earth he was