re: Read this bullshite piece on why Late Night Talk Shows are dying

Cutting off your peepee is not funny

People under 30 straight up don’t watch tv. Some might watch live sports (and that’s a far smaller percentage than previous generations), but they stream all of their entertainment. A lot of them don’t give a shite about music or movies either. For them, it’s all about video games, podcasts, twitch streamers (usually videogame related content), short form video (tik toks), and youtubers. The youtuber and the podcast has replaced the late night talk show.

Late night talk shows are expensive to make, however, they often operated as a loss leader for tv networks because they served a vital purpose of cross promoting content across different branches of the same company. So, an actor in a Disney movie would go on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel and promote their movie while the musical guest is one signed to a label also owned by ABC. However, if key demographics that drive sales aren’t watching, then the late night show isn’t helpful for cross promotion. It’s just an expensive production with a shrinking audience.

Folks under 30 don’t care about the celebrities that late night shows air. If they did, they’d just watch the short clips edited down in tiktoks. The reality is that these consumers are completely different from previous generations, and zoomers are even more so. Conventional media hasn’t figured out yet how to effectively market to and capitalize on them via their rapidly anachronistic distribution model.

The late night show lost its relevancy with all other demos by prioritizing propaganda over entertainment to such an extent, that it was no longer subtle or entertaining. People were willing to subject themselves to a little propaganda so long as it was subtle, and the programming was still funny. These programs simply went too hard in the paint focusing exclusively on Trump for so long that audiences got bored and turned them off. So, they failed to capture the new demo AND turned away their legacy customers. Can’t imagine what that must have done to ratings…

All of the Monkees except for Mickey Dolenz are dead.

quote:

---

I haven't watched it since Letterman got into politics. How long ago was that? But even then, I didn't watch it consistently because I got up early to do gym before work.

---

Honestly the late night shows as far as I’m concerned basically died with Conan’s last two weeks hosting the Tonight Show. Everyone but Leno and Fallon were on the very top of their games. Like you had to watch and record each of them because they were all just ripping Leno and NBC apart. Those two weeks if you don’t remember them were glorious: Conan’s Bugatti Veyron Mouse

quote:

---

Then there was the Kentucky Derby winner watching restricted Super Bowl footage while wearing a mink Snuggie.

Conan and company basically said “frick it” and had fun with doing bits that either did bite the hand or make it appear as such.

---

I mean, those idiots decided to slash the show in mid-January while giving him his full annual budget a mere few weeks earlier. Of course he was going to cut into that thing. Just idiots.

Another funny one was Conan doing a staff family expansion picture they typically do at the end of the life of these shows that they show the pics of the families at the beginning vs the end of the show to show how many kids they've had. Conan said that six months wasn't even enough time to gestate a baby, but when he started hearing rumors he might get canned bought a bunch of hampsters and then showed off their babies instead. It only takes 20 days for a hamster to gestate a litter, and Conan wanted that pic of at least some expansion of the Tonight Show family.

quote:

---

You look like idiots when you deny the effects of streaming.

---

You could say the exact same thing for denying the effects of the late night shows going extreme partisan

quote:

---

You could say the exact same thing for denying the effects of the late night shows going extreme partisan

---

Show me where I did that.