“The Late Shift” a decade later, and the inescapable CHAOS
First of all, I do read books. I’ve read many books. Some, in fact, aren’t even about television. Last week I finally got around to reading Bill Carter’s The Late Shift. Why I hadn’t read this book is a mystery to me as “Late Night” shows are one of my favorite kinds of programming– they’re, in a way, the last remaining installations of television’s golden era.
The Late Shift is a really good read, but its especially interesting a dozen years after the fact. Knowing the after-effects of this late-night-battle makes for a delightful bit of history-via-Miss Cleo. Also interesting was finishing up Carter’s book right around the same time I heard this fascinating follow-up to a recurring story on WNYC’s “On the Media” detailing what Bob Garfield refers to as his “Television Chaos Theory.” These seemingly unrelated areas, “Absolte Chaos” and “Late Night,” might not be all that far apart. Their inevitable collision could equate to CERTAIN DISASTER (a gorey tragedy for those who take television history a least half seriously, though great fodder for television and technology bloggers). Keep reading after the jump…
One of the major issues during the battle for late night [the time period marked by the year prior to Johnny Carson leaving the tonight show and 18 months or so after Jay Leno took over] was affiliate support and syndication. NBC and The Tonight Show were so firmly rooted in the American television consciousness the idea of an affiliate not carrying the program at its designated time (11:35pm est) was unheard of during Carson’s glory years. However, as the show aged these local stations began to realize they could make more money by placing a rerun of Cheers after the local news and pushing Carson back to midnight. Since The Tonight Show was/is such a cash cow for NBC, the idea of pushing back its start time deeply troubled the suits in New York who were still trying to sell advertising to companies under the assurance that the show would start at 11:35. This is what got the storm brewing. Fresh blood [Leno] was brought in to attract a younger demographic (natch), jump start the ratings, and most importantly insure that the affiliates wouldn’t delay the start of the show.
CBS had no late night tradition. It’s great white dope, Pat Sajak, was a complete disaster. Before Letterman made the move in 1993, most CBS affiliates would play rerun sit-coms after their local news, or they’d take the CBS network feed which showed a series of late-night crime shows. Neither one of these things could establish any sort of ratings coup for the network.
This relationship is the fundamental piece of what makes broadcast television possible (and free). The networks absolutely need the affiliates. Without them there’s nowhere to broadcast their content. NBC can’t put a fifteen-mile-high tower at the top of 30 Rockefeller Center and try to feed the continental United States themselves, though you’d have to admit that’d be pretty damn cool, even though they’d, at best, reach central Pennsylvania (stupid curvature of the earth!).
Likewise, the affiliates absolutely need the networks. Without them they’d have to produce their own content, which would financially destroy these small stations that are scraping by to begin with. It would also mean you’d get a lot more shows along the lines of “The Council Of Bluffs” [look it up].
When Letterman decided to jump to CBS he went to as many affiliates as he could attempting to convince them he’d deliver better ratings than whatever syndicated series they were currently airing during that time period. Just because a network creates a new show, the affiliates have no obligation to actually air it. Obviously turning down prime-time content is a questionable move, but if you have the option of going with a syndicated sit-com with a track record, like Cheers, or a risky new talk-show hosted by a man frequently asked for vowels– you go with the sit-com.
This leads us to “chaos.”
Here’s how the theory goes, as explained by Mr. Garfield:
Mainstream media, especially network TV, lose so much audience, they can no longer attract the advertising revenue they need to sustain their content, leading to still more audience defection, then more advertiser defection, and so on into the toilet, all before the online brave new world is ready to take over.
Late night TV, especially since the publication of “The Late Shift,” has experienced a definite sea change. The book ends with Letterman, the broadcaster, handily beating Leno, the comic across the board. And this was done with fewer affiliates broadcasting The Late Show than The Tonight Show. Since then, America has decided that it actually likes Leno a little more than Letterman. I’m not entirely sure when the ratings switched, but Leno has consistently beat Letterman for years. Another 2000 words could be written about why this happened but for the sake of moving things along, let’s just call it “Options.”
Personally, I find it hard to believe that all those people that were watching Letterman the first couple years he was on CBS just up and decided that they actually preferred the other guy all along, flipped the channel and never came back. Instead, it seems much more likely that Letterman’s audience has been slowly drifting to cable over the past decade. The audience loss, in the above Chaos Theory can be seen anywhere on the network schedule, but the nowhere as clearly as in late night.
The Daily Show and Adult Swim have siphoned off more than a few viewers of network television over the years. If this is indeed the plaque-stained face of CHAOS claiming his first victim, here’s how I imagine it going down:
- Network late night shows consistently lose viewers to cable TV, video games, the internet, gypsies, etc.
- These already expensive programs begin to lose ad revenue.
- Since no suit is going to tell David Letterman or Jay Leno (maybe Jimmy Kimmel) that they have to cut back, the late night picture will look exactly like it has looked since the mid-90s despite the declining numbers.
- Eventually Jay Leno retires (or steps down, or gets fired, or whatever) and by “eventually” I mean “in 2009.” David Letterman isn’t too far behind him (he’ll approach 30 years on television, but will step down before, in respect to Johnny).
- Their retirement, in addition to corporate pressures (and low ratings), open up a window of opportunity to completely rework the late-night format.
- The younger generation, who has always been the formats bread and butter, never embraced the idea of a guy behind a desk to begin with and doesn’t show up to the new nightime programming.
- Technological innovations (on-demand, downloadable content) contribute to this mess.
- Late night, while still present, becomes a shadow of its former self.
But wait, there’s more!
The real victim of this audience exodus, isn’t the proud late-night tradition, but the affiliates. They’re already taking a hit from antsy networks. Here’s another excerpt from the On The Media story:
BOB GARFIELD: I remember a few years back, the automobile manufacturers tried to experiment with selling their cars to consumers directly via the Internet. And the dealerships went crazy, because [LAUGHS] they’d been cut out of the distribution chain that they’d cultivated for, you know, a hundred years. Is that’s what’s happening here?
TERRY HEATON: Well, I think exactly that’s what’s happening here. My clients are all local broadcasters, and so I’m very familiar with this. And they don’t say a lot publicly about it, but privately they’re terribly concerned. I think they view the disruption of the Internet as a threat more than an opportunity.
The major cash stream for the affiliates has always been local news. In the case of modern television, some of those ratings are directly tied to the late-night programming. The average joe lays in his bed on a nondescript weeknight, watches the news and then checks out Leno’s monologue and checks out who’s going to be on the couch.
If this money dries up, both from fewer viewers bringing in fewer ad dollars, and from networks offering content directly to the viewer via the web/on-demand, local stations will certainly close, or at the very least could completely change their structure. This is ultimately where the CHAOS starts to become, um… chaotic.
Look, there’s no doubt television is changing, but it isn’t like the box-office where people actually don’t seem to be showing up. If anything, there are more television viewers now than ever, but those viewers en masse aren’t watching what they used to watch. These forces will eventually cause a drastic (troubling to some) shift in where the power is located on the television spectrum. Late-night just might be the piece of that spectrum most likely to get the ball rolling.
The real question is what this new frontier will look like, but that, my friends, is for another day.
Tags: Bill Carter, Books, CBS, NBC, The Industry, The Late Shift, The Late Show, The Tonight Show, web-video
June 12th, 2006 at 3:40 pm
Leno began winning with a notable scoop: Hugh Grant’s first interview after his little “incident” with a prostitute.
Also, 2009 begins the Conan O’Brien era. This, unfortunately, won’t lead to completely reworking the late-night format. What will happen, though, both to Conan and to NBC, is worthy of its own post. (I suspect we’ll see the demise of the old, weird Conan — which arguably could boost ratings by appealing to the stoners and college kids who have always liked his show and would probably follow him to the new timeslot — with the replacement of the new, careerist Conan — more middle-brow celebrity jokes to tuck in middle-aged middle America, who might be the only people who would be watching such a show.)
June 12th, 2006 at 3:54 pm
LA always has the advantage over New York in terms of celebrity bookings. An interesting tangent to the above is to factor in the celebrity publicity machine, and how that could affect the future of late-night. Could the missing ad dollars be made up from Hollywood because it needs the talk shows to promote their movies?
Also, I left Conan out deliberately as my fingers were getting tired, but if the show he’s suppose to inherit is but a shadow of its former self in 2009 (not just because Leno has run it into the ground, but because there simply isn’t any significance left) is it possible that dear, sweet, lovable Conan ends up taking over the show just before the bomb goes off? Will history look back at his time in television as being the man who killed late-night?
June 13th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
I don’t see why Conan would get the blame for killing late night. I suspect cable, the Web, video games, etc. — all targeted at a large segment of the late-night audience (males 18-30) — will get the blame (or credit) in the long-run.