\n\tIn 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.<\/p>\n
\n\tOver 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\u2019t. To protect SNL, and all of its absurd \u201cwasteful\u201d use of resources, he needs to stick around.<\/p>\n
\n\tOnce Michaels is gone, all bets are off.<\/p>\n
\n\tMichaels, of course, rules NBC\u2019s 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).<\/p>\n
\n\tHe is, in many ways, the last man standing in late night TV<\/a>: CBS got out of the game, renting the hour to Byron Allen\u2019s 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\u2019s final season.<\/p>\n \n\tJimmy 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.<\/p>\n \n\tLast week, the New York Post\u2019s Page Six reported<\/a> that Kimmel\u2019s 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<\/a> some of those gaps: Kimmel and ABC were in fact in talks for another one-year contract extension \u2026 but the network wants pretty serious budget cuts, to the tune of 20 percent or so.<\/p>\n \n\tPage 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.<\/p>\n \n\tThe budget cuts are a grim reality of late night. Even NBC\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n\tEven Kimmel\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n\tAdvertising 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.<\/p>\n \n\tRatings 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.<\/p>\n \n\tLast 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.<\/p>\n \n\tWhat we know of as late night won\u2019t vanish, of course. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \n\tConan O\u2019Brien, 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.<\/p>\n \n\tBut it was his appearance on the YouTube talk show Hot Ones that really opened his eyes to the reality of late night\u2019s decline.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThat was the moment the scales fell from my eyes,\u201d O\u2019Brien told THR earlier this year<\/a>. \u201cIf 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 \u2026 that\u2019s when I profoundly understood that late night shows are in trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tIndeed, 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<\/a>, late night TV \u201cgets reconstituted in your feed, which is a personalized set of preferences in terms of what speaks to you around that particular format, whether it\u2019s the monologue, whether it\u2019s the sketch, whether it\u2019s what Brittany [Broski] does in terms of the conversation,\u201d Mohan says.<\/p>\n \n\tYouTube is also happy to have legacy talent in its house too, just like O\u2019Brien. It\u2019s 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<\/a>; why not keep them around? It may not pay the bills for a Manhattan studio and a crew north of 100 people, but there\u2019s no reason that these pieces of TV history need to vanish altogether.<\/p>\n \n\tThe 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\u2019s 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\u2019t fly.<\/p>\n \n\tThe good news? Fresh, exciting and original programming will be born online when they do pack it in.<\/p>\n \n\tAnd as anyone prowling YouTube for original comedy knows, that next generation of \u201clate night TV\u201d is already forming; it just might not be late at night, or on TV.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWhy would I watch? Five white guys, I mean, talk about the most stale environment,\u201d former late night host Chelsea Handler said last week at a live taping of Malcolm Gladwell and Kenya Barris\u2019 The Unusual Suspects podcast at Audible\u2019s Minetta Lane Theatre, when asked if she still watches late night TV (the episode will premiere Oct. 29). \u201cYou know, some of these guys are my friends, but \u2026 it\u2019s so anachronistic. It\u2019s so antiquated. \u2029Who is tuning in, and you\u2019re watching clips? Of course, you know, if you\u2019re online, it\u2019s so stale.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the new documentary Lorne, a memorable scene sees Lorne Michaels, the Saturday Night Live creator and king…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":895677,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,134,28684,427],"class_list":["post-895676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-entertainment","tag-late-night-tv","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=895676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/895676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/895677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=895676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=895676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=895676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}