Who will be the heir to Stephen Colbert’s Late Show vacuum?
There’s a vacuum in US late night TV and the broadcast TV networks are squandering the opportunity.
When Jay Leno took over The Tonight Show from Johnny Carson, he had his show launch the first Monday after Carson’s final episode. He kept the momentum rolling and didn’t allow an opportunity to lose viewers who had a jumping off point.
There is now a Late Show hole in the schedule for the first time since 1993, with the show cancelled by CBS. There are going to be a couple of million displaced viewers with a late night schedule disrupted. They’ll be seeking a new show. Conventional wisdom is that many of Colbert’s viewers will find their way to Jimmy Kimmel Live! But, there are no efforts being made to onboard those viewers.
For the Monday show Kimmel has a repeat airing. Fallon has a repeat airing. You know who doesn’t have a repeat? Late Show timeslot replacement show Comics Unleashed will run a new episode. There will also be a new episode of Gutfeld!
I’ll be interested in watching the ratings over the coming month. Kimmel will absolutely get a viewer bounce… but so will the Fox News comedy panel show Gutfeld! That show attracts a bigger moderate and left audience than you’d expect.
The reason for the repeats tonight is largely because it is the Memorial Day weekend in the US. Even so, I’d still be looking to attract those viewers. Kimmel will be back on Tuesday to start picking up the Colbert homeless with a new episode. Fallon will stay in repeats for the week.
While the networks squander the opportunity to attract viewers, indie producers are pitching their panel chat shows to Deadline, trying to tap into the narrative that these shows will be The Late Show successors.
In recent weeks there has been multiple references on Deadline to Outside Tonight, a variety talk show backed by YouTube and hosted by Recess Therapy host Julian Shapiro-Barnum. There’s also Brittany Broski’s Royal Court, chicken wing talk show Hot Ones, and countless others.
Today you have Ben Gleib, host of YouTube series Good Night with Ben Gleib. He’s featured on Deadline today talking about his $1.5 million late night show set to be hosted from his house.
With Black Eyed Peas drummer Keith Harris serving as band leader and Stewart Bailey (The Daily Show, Last Call with Carson Daly) as showrunner, Gleib’s show most importantly boasts a dramatically leaner footprint than a traditional network talk show.
The crazy part? He’s taping shows from his home in Los Angeles, producing a first season of 42 episodes, plus 42 post-show episodes, for around $1.5 million.
For Gleib, a self-described night owl who became obsessed with late-night as a child, Good Night with Ben Gleib represents the culmination of a lifelong ambition — and something he’s been actively building toward since college. While attending UC San Diego in the late ’90s, he created and hosted The Gleib Show, a talk show serving as his honors thesis, which later ran on the National Lampoon College Network. Gleib’s work there led to a Fox pilot produced by Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video — an early brush with traditional TV that ultimately did not move forward to series.
Ultimately, the late night chat show audience is mostly older viewers who are rusted on to broadcast. I don’t see many of these YouTube upstarts doing much to take viewership away from broadcast. There will be some folks who were watching Colbert clips on YouTube that have some more free viewing time.
Maybe the one true successor to Colbert will be Stephen Colbert himself, who launched a YouTube channel this past month. Right now he is hosting the single episode of Only in Monroe, the public access show he hosted as a goof following the end of his show last week. But don’t be surprised if that channel springs to life in the coming months with occasional random videos leading towards whatever it is he plans to do for his next act.
The Hacks team say it’s important to get physical
The producers of Hacks, Paul Downs and Jen Statsky, in an interview with Deadline, spoke about how important it was to them to get a full-series release of their HBO Max streaming show on DVD.
“It’s such an important time for people to invest in physical media because you’re right, things are coming down all the time and it’s like, ‘Oh, I love that movie, I want to see it.’ You just can’t, babe, it doesn’t exist,” said Aniello. “That does really put so much power of the distribution of art in the hands of algorithms and people’s whims and certain executives not liking somebody’s brother, so they take down their movie or show or whatever. It is really scary, the idea of censorship, especially as more and more companies are bought up by other companies.”
But don’t mistake this enthusiasm for actual plans to release such a thing:
Aniello added, “And so, we’re really hoping to make a Hacks DVD box set, for one. We’re trying to make that happen. That’s an exclusive. Please go buy it, not because we make any money off of it. We just want to make sure the show stays in existence for as long as DVD players exist.”
I find the arguments for physical media tiresome. There will always be a certain section of the audience that will want the physical product for whatever reason (as someone who has moved house, frankly, too many times already in his life, the idea of carting around more discs makes me shake), but broadly it seems clear that audiences have moved on in how they want to consume something.
Gone are the days of sitting on your couch smashing through episodes of 24 or Arrested Development or Scrubs or The Wire. The convenience of not having to get up off the couch to put on another disc and remembering exactly which episode you are up to wins out. Also, the expense of physical media isn’t as appealing now that we have a superior choice with streaming.
But Downs and Statsky hit upon the important need for consumers to have access to these shows in perpetuity. The idea that exists by way of physical media is a lie – niche releases go out of print, hiking the price up so high that it puts it out of reach for most viewers anyway.
Viewers have taken a lot of archival into their own hands, downloading movies and TV shows, then storing them on hardware to access them by way of playforms like Plex. That’s certainly a better solution than just hoping your favourite forgotten show just turns up on Tubi one day.
What we do need is a better, more legal version of the Plex experience. The ability to purchase shows in a digital environment with safeguards in place that whatever files you have in your digital account remain your property (and it isn’t just a video license). As video resolution improves over time, studios can then upsell buyers to higher resolution versions.
And like Plex, there needs to be a fediverse-style ability for users to move their library to different providers so that it isn’t tied to, say, the Apple ecosystem-system or Amazon’s in perpetuity.
Let’s stop wasting breath evangelising for physical media and instead lets focus on evolving the product that is purpose fit for the consumer and not Hollywood’s lawyers.
News Desk
There’s actually some fun, actual celebrities on the upcoming US Celebrity Wheel of Fortune. Read: thefutoncritic
Trailer Park
The Marked Woman debuts on Netflix June 5.
When a woman is found in a shipping container with no memory of who she is, two detectives race to figure out her identity - and who wants her dead.
President Curtis debuts on Adult Swim in July.
That’s the newsletter for the today.
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