Will there still be late night talk shows in 2034?

That's the question keeping Jimmy Kimmel up at night:

“I don’t know if there will be any late-night television shows on network TV in ten years. Maybe there’ll be one but there won’t be a lot of them,” he said on the Politickin’ podcast. “There’s a lot to watch and now people can watch anything at anytime, they’ve got all these streaming services. It used to be Johnny Carson was the only thing on at 11:30pm and so everybody watched and then David Letterman was on after Johnny so people watched those two shows but now they’re so many options. Maybe more significantly, the fact that people are easily able to watch your monologue online the next day, it really cancels out the need to watch it when it’s on the air and once people stop watching it when it’s on the air, networks are going to stop paying for it to be made.” 

I doubt Jimmy Kimmel will have much to worry about the Monday after his last late night broadcast, whenever that happens (hopefully not for a long time). But he is right to notice a trend: there are fewer late night talk shows than there were just a handful of years ago. Samantha Bee's Full Frontal was great, for example. She might not have had as big of an audience as hosts on the legacy networks, but she seemed to hold her own - as I would expect from any Daily Show alum. It could be that the audience is just no longer there to sustain this particular form of entertainment. 

Late night talk shows have, since the 1970s, changed considerably and in some other ways are still the same. Let's start with what hasn't changed. With the exception of COVID era duly noted, late night talk shows are recorded before a live audience. The host starts with an opening monologue, followed by interviews with guests (typically entertainers promoting their latest film/series/LP or popular author promoting their latest book. Occasionally political figures would appear as guest, although the content rarely got terribly political or partisan. At some point there might be a musical guest to perform their latest hit. Inevitably there would be banter between the host and cohost, or in David Letterman's case banter with his bandleader. By the time I was watching The Tonight Show (then starring Johnny Carson), the formula was already time-tested. Johnny Carson was safe as milk, although some of his guest hosts were more willing to take risks. David Letterman was my preference once I was into my last couple years of high school in the early 1980s (edgier humor, which I appreciate).

Fast forward a few decades. Trump entered the chat when he came down a golden elevator and announced his candidacy in the summer of 2015. At first, it seemed like a publicity stunt - the sort talk show hosts would have a fairly predictable way of handling. Then shit got real. Trump not only turns out to be a formidable candidate but wins the Presidency in 2016 and proceeds to act like a dictator (a performance that gets increasingly convincing as the years progressed). Most late night comedy stayed relatively politically neutral. We entered an era where neutrality was not an option anymore. Talk show hosts had to take sides, and they did. There seemed no shortage of audience demand during the waning years of the 2010s and throughout 2020. The energy (and audience) diminished after Biden was sworn in and we went back to an era where it is harder to write jokes about a President who quietly got to work undoing a lot of damage from the previous administration, advocating for legislation, signing bills into law, meeting with international leaders, etc. In the comedy world, that's as exciting as watching paint dry. We live in a polarized era, and we have enough politicians who are more interested in performance art than meaningful policy (Gaetz, MTG, Boebert, Trump and any associate), and any alleged (and as of this summer real) crimes by Trump and his comrades to provide material. There is still a ton of comedy out there. But I think the primary audience base for political comedy dwindled after early 2021 (mainly liberals and moderates). Let's face it: four years of Trump wore us out. It was time to tune out. It's a shame as I think there is some great writing still. Heck, I even post it here. 

I treat the concept of political humor and humor with a very overt partisan quality as foreign to late night, and for the most part it was until roughly a decade ago. It's not like there were no political late night comedy options. Bill Maher's Politically Incorrect aired on a legacy network for several years (until his show got cancelled after the host made a joke that offended staunch George W. Bush proponents in the early aughts) using a round-table format. The Daily Show, hosted for a long time by Jon Stewart, was and is a parody of both the standard talk show format and of cable news show formats. If you wonder where the phrase "fake news" came from, credit Jon Stewart. And The Daily Show spun off so many late night shows with varying degrees of success. I was a fan of The Colbert Report, which was a parody of the Fox News talk show format, as well as Samantha Bee's Full Frontal. Both Steve Colbert and Samantha Bee could create spot-on parodies of conservatives and their views, back in the day when conservative wasn't necessarily a euphemism for authoritarian. I'd say John Oliver has had a great run, so far, with his weekly series on HBO. Last Week Tonight is well worth watching. What was new during the latter years of the 2010s was that, as noted earlier, late night comedians could no longer tell jokes and interview guests. They had to become considerably more serious, and most importantly, they had to take a stand. Obviously, they are still in the business of writing and telling jokes. These hosts needed to stay funny, and thankfully they generally met the moment, and still are meeting the moment. 

So let's say the audience may have taken a bit of a downturn. That will get a show cancelled. I wouldn't be surprised if the seeming end of the Trump era was an opportunity to find other things to laugh at. Humor can be a coping mechanism, but what if we don't need to cope right now? We can try some lighter humor that isn't trying to make a point or educate. I wondered for a while if there was a glut of late night talk show hosts. Maybe the potential viewers were there, but there were too many shows to choose from. No doubt that plays a role in the decline of the late night talk show. And then on a more macro level is the change in how we view our late night talk shows. I rarely have the TV on after about 8 pm. I am still awake, but am more likely to stream a show or DVR it and watch it the next day when I have time. I am definitely one of those viewers who watches opening monologues on YouTube. If the ratings and advertising dollars aren't there, neither will the shows. That is the reality.

Kimmel may be right that in 10 years, there might be a single late night talk show as we recognize it now. What the future looks like is unclear. I have some doubts that the current late night format will survive on the major streaming services. We don't even know which streaming services will be around in 10 years. Maybe hosts will have channels on YouTube, and then be at the whim of whatever sponsors they can secure. Or maybe this all morphs into podcasts. I honestly don't know. Maybe nothing changes in 10 years. Your guess is as good as mine.