Jay Leno moving back to the Tonight Show?

[Sylph]

Yes, of course.

I don't blame him for hating, but I'm just bored. He hasn't moved from that phase of his life, we can, I guess, always rely on sh!tty Letterman jokes on Leno/Carson switch.

[Sylph]

Apparently, 4 million watch Late Show. Which is somewhere between B&B and Y&R.

[All My Shadows]

Four million people that I don't know

[bellcurve]

Late night talk shows still attracts eyeballs. Especially when noteworthy guests appear, like Paris Hilton, Kanye West, Obama, etc.

AMS, I am shocked you've never met anyone who watches/likes late night TV. Not even Arsenio?!

[Sylph]

I know. My comment wasn't ironic.

I was just posting statistics.

[All My Shadows]

It mostly has to do with my age. My contemporaries (very bottom of 18-49), I've found, really just don't have an interest in the current late night talk show circuit. The humor is much too "old," even with someone like Conan or Kimmel. The whole "Tonight Show" franchise/legacy is something that I don't see appealing to young people today. What's comedy to us is very different. It's not a bad thing or a good thing, it just is, you know? Network TV is also "old." Sure, there are a few folks I know who watch Grey's in primetime, and of course, the CW's lineup, but other than that, look at the mean ages for various shows in primetime. Even CW's "Vampire Diaries" has a mean age of somewhere around 32-35. If they're not watching the networks during primetime, they're not really gonna venture into broadcast territory for late night, especially when cable has repeats of the network shows that they aren't watching in primetime (Family Guy/NCIS/L&O/CSI).

If a young comedian, like a Dave Chappelle, had a late night talk show on Comedy Central, it would almost be a guaranteed hit with the college crowd. As it stands, Jay Leno isn't very appealing, Letterman isn't, and once you get pass 10:35 (because I live in the Central time zone, and I'll never feel right calling it 11:35), people are falling asleep or they only have the TV on as background noise while Facebook causes widespread insomnia. Jimmy Fallon is totally not what young people want to watch, no matter what NBC might think.

[Sylph]

But isn't that contradictory in that you watch soaps? Which is a genre that couldn't really skew older than it already does?

[All My Shadows]

Oh, absolutely, but I'm an exception. I watch daytime and I watch primetime shows in their first-run. There are lots and lots of exceptions, I'm sure, but the vast majority? Don't watch soaps (and if they do, it's not in a watch-every-day sense), don't watch late night at all, and might watch some primetime shows on the networks, but mainly in cable repeats.

I don't have anything to back this up, and I could be totally and utterly and completely wrong, but I'm a college student who knows enough people and has seen enough "About Me" sections that barely have anything under the "TV" column.

[bellcurve]

Jesus, you're that young?! LOL. You've really done your TV/Soap research.

And Arsenio was much like Chappelle back in the day. Not so much in the comedy route(because Chappelle would wipe the floor with Arsenio), but Arsenio's show was more edgy, featured more rock/rap/R&B groups, and appealed to a younger audience. Arsenio was pre-internet and was very much instrumental in spreading the rumor that Milli Vanilli was a fraud and, of course, he was right. Extremely instrumental in exposing Bill Clinton to a younger/minority audience, that ultimately helped seal the 1992 election. YouTube some of his controversies(i.e. Queer Nation) and you'll see what I mean. No talk show host, even today, would keep that in their show.

Comedy Central seems very happy with Daily Show/Colbert Report.

[Sylph]

But I think you're right. This is a major problem for TV business today and I think we are in the transition period, between old, traditional TV and a model which shall dominate the future. And it's unclear what that will be: online, cable, pay-per-view/on-demand...

By the way... Can someone tell me where to find the writers for all these shows (Leno, O'Brien, Letterman, Fallon, Ferguson, Daly...)? Including Jon Steward and Saturday Night Live?

Bellcurve, what are your late night watching habits? And what do you think about Jon Stewart? And also The Simpsons and South Park, since I'm already asking?

[Sylph]

Nikki has a ninth update:

[bellcurve]

Sadly, I work most weeknights, but I usually stick with Nightline. Around fall of last year, ABC was the only analog station I could get, so that was the show I became attached to. And I really loved the radical changes Nightline made(turning into more of a newsmagazine) and I love the show's graphics. And after Nightline, I'd catch Jerry Springer for the juvenile, 3rd Grade level audience questions("So he worked at Subway. Did you get the six inch or the footlong?"). Either that or something else in syndication.

Also, I don't have cable so I don't watch Daily Show/Colbert Report and quite frankly, I can't stand the hype surrounding those shows. It's a typical, "OMG, I watch this show. Therefore, it makes me smart!" among those who drink wheat beers or Cosmotinis and want to appear educated and knowledgeable in regards to politics and foreign affairs instead of watching stuff like Sunday roundtables or the actual CNN/Fox News interviews themselves. They prefer the humor, the cherrypicking, etc. Which I guess is fine, but I usually lose respect for people who start a morning conversation with, "OMG, DID YOU SEE THE DAILY SHOW! OMG!!!" With regard to Stewart, I love his delivery from what I've seen and I have immense respect for him changing the game and making the show more about news and politics, therefore making people forget Craig Kilborn even existed. His being mean to Jennifer Love Hewitt(around the time she was promoting Garfield) was great.

The Simpsons still delivers a good laugh, but the Bart-Centric years were way better though(the first five-seven seasons). And South Park hits more than misses. I got really hooked on the show when it was double-airing in syndication on the MyNetworkTV station here. And before you ask, I love the Seth MacFarlane franchise, no matter how offensive it is. The show has great moments.

[bellcurve]

Either they are lowballing Conan and/or, as everyone is predicting, Conan wants this to get ugly. I feel bad for him, but at this point, NBC is going to get what they want.

[All My Shadows]

EricMontreal had the same reaction when we had a PM convo last week. I'm young, but I like to say I'm eclectic. I grew up on Nick at Nite, and I've an unhealthy obsession with television and the biz. If I had the talent, I'd love to be a part of it, but sadly, I do not.

Oh yeah, I know all about Arsenio, but I would have felt weak (and a little precocious) if I'd said "Oh, I was still in Pampers when he was on."

What made Arsenio successful was the fact that he wasn't trying to put his mark on a long-standing, beloved, time-honored, (stuffy, safe, boring!) television "legacy." That's why Conan kinda annoys me. He's all about wanting "The Tonight Show." If he wants to do his comedy, reach people, inspire young comics, etc, he should be content to do that on any show, whether it's "Tonight," "Today," or "Yesterday Afternoon." No, he seems hung up on wanting to follow in someone else's footsteps and being put in the same company as Carson, Allen, etc. That's all fine and dandy, but when Carson took over in '62, he didn't inherit a "legacy" that he had to "keep going" blah blah blah. He just did his comedy. Just do your damn comedy, and stop being pretentious.

I side with Conan on this one. I get why he's pissed, because the one thing I will shoot a person for is going back on their word. Do not tell a person A and then do B without a valid explanation. That's why I won't boo-hoo over Jay being "forced out." He agreed to the deal knowing the terms. No one screwed him over. If he didn't like their deal, he could have left, but he stayed.

Exactly. In the end, the only thing the people behind the shows (and I mean the shows themselves, not the networks) can really do is put out what they feel is their best product. If they do that and still fail, then they know for certain that one (or both) of these two things must be true: Their best is no longer what most people want, or the problem is beyond the show.

[Sylph]

Wow, I love this post. Except for Bart Simpson, I can't stand him.

And Jon Stewart's dog eating Jennifer's chihuahua was just pricelessss! It was WTF?, bizarre, what-did-I-just-see?, but so much fun! And she handled it well, I guess.