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Jimmy Kimmel pulled indefinitely by ABC for Charlie Kirk comments.
Late night talk show hosts have waned from their glorious Letterman days, but boomers still care about then enough that they're still a scalp worth scraping off the skull. It's hard to think of a prominent figure on the right that would be equal in stature - Gina Carano? Piers Morgan? Roseanne Barr? nothing like him - if only for the fact that the entertainment industry is so aligned to the left. Indeed, even during the height of the progressive cancel culture era, it was liberal icons like Louis CK and JK Rowling that felt the heat.
If such a big figure can fall, who will be next?
With Colbert going off the air, and with the upcoming FCC hearings on Twitch, Reddit, Discord, and Steam, one can only anticipate the prizes that are coming. Destiny and Hasan are obvious trophies that the right would love to claim, but I have no doubt that the powerjanitors of Reddit are quaking in their boots. How many leftist/liberal commentators have made snarky comments on social media, as of late? This is the reddest of the red meat, dripping with blood, raw. The long march through the institutions has only just begun, and for the populist right base, it'll be a enjoyable hike indeed.
It is financial. No reason to think that it was in better shape than Colbert. And it was a just a good pretext to sack him, while letting the admin take the blame. Disney would have fought tooth and nail to preserve a real moneymaker.
On the other hand - a person has an absolute right to go on the street and sing ding dong the witch is dead.
Terrestrial television has been a walking corpse for over a decade. The only things that can bring in ratings to actually crow about anymore are sports. Grey's Anatomy is still pulling in the highest ratings some weeks (yes, it's still on the air) and the ratings it pulls are half of what it pulled a decade ago and half again what it was pulling when it started. Late Night, though, is a special kind of undead especially since Leno left and even then I doubt it was making the network much money.
I remember reading a while back that late night shows are very different from other shows in that they shed a massive amount of audience something like two-thirds of the viewers turn it off by the musical act and about half turn it off right after the monologue. For a show that doesn't really have a long-tail way to make money the ratings of these shows represent a lie and everyone actually involved in spending money on them know this, Colbert/Kimmel/etc are not getting ad buys that represent anywhere near what the ratings might suggest because the a large portion of those ratings don't have any ad viewership.
I'm sure the fact that the two interview segments and music segments are also usually just sponsored segments in anything but name help things seem more worth it because there's really not a lot of options for press junkets to even get any sort of play at all. But as a viewer, unless the host is funny or willing to go off script, they're really not worth watching. The fact that ABC is pulling Kimmel is probably the biggest alarm bell that not only do these shows not make money, they're probably not even useful as ads anymore because they've got the studio synergy (ABC/Disney), he's the only game in LA/Hollywood--which costs less than New York as a rule-- and he's literally only famous for being a late night host (and this is coming from someone who lives in California and listened to the local radio show he was on before he seemingly randomly ended up as a late night show host) so he had to be cheaper than dirt when he started.
Of course the, "when he started," is doing a a lot of heavy lifting here. Most shows that have any amount of longevity these days die from costs inflating. The second contract is more expensive than the first, and the third more than the second, and eventually the bottom falls out. If new late shows pop up with no names like Kimmel then the show itself being a pittance of ratings was never the reason, it was just too expensive to keep the hosts. It's amazing to me that the only way they seem to make any money aside from the first airing is cutting stuff up for youtube but there has to be some licensing deal that fucks things up because even on their own streaming platform they only have the current seasons of their late night shows. Why not just throw every Letterman onto Paramount plus (or whatever the new name is) and squeeze just a little value out of a library that's basically doing nothing. But maybe they can't due to how the shows work licensing-wise and that's why they're not worth making. It's gotta burn rent-free in some executive's head the absolute insanity of filling out an entire 8-11 schedule five or six days of the week and nobody fucking cares or watches (for many years it's felt like the big three networks program for every available hour they can out of pure prestige and if they didn't then they were at the CW level, low class television for teen girls and idiots, even fox at least tried late night) because they're watching the US office through for the fifteenth time. Turns out the same inertia that kept people throwing on late night shows they didn't really care that much about also applies to them throwing on old sitcoms or light hour-longs like Suits.
I will say, these shows (Colbert and Kimmel) suuuuuucked. Like I only watched Kimmel maybe 20 times over the past few decades and every time it was mostly Meh, but I never watched him when he got into his woke arc. But Colbert was horrible and has been horrible since the first season but I watched that entire first season and some of the second. It was never funny, the interviews were always ambien-laced cotton candy, and it had the worst bits I've ever seen in late night that wasn't some no-budget show like Samantha's Bee's or W. Kamau Bell's. I guess the good writers from the Colbert Report didn't come with him (that show was definitely losing steam by the end and was mostly coasting on reusing jokes but Stephen could pull that off).
There had to have been a concerted effort to make all shows copy The Daily Show's success, at least with young people because their eyes are worth more. But it didn't ever really translate, they cut up the daily show into so many pieces that none of them were nearly as good as it was and the regular late night shows picking up the baton to pander partisanship were not funny enough to pull it off. For partisan ribbing to work it has to be funny and if you're not trying to be funny in a late show monologue then you actually better say something interesting instead. Doing neither is certainly a choice but I also can't imagine Kimmel suddenly becoming neck deep in woke wasn't explicitly accepted or even pushed by the executives above him and this is just a fig leaf to throw out dead wood.
Because I think it's notable that Colbert just won an emmy, for a show that is by all accounts a financial failure and that's never really had a good bit or monologue as far as I could tell or have heard only because people were convinced that Trump ordered it cancelled and they're signing the resistance pledge. ABC probably saw all that shit and went "Fuuuuuuuuucckkk, how are we gonna get rid of Kimmel now?" and here we are.
The problem is the format itself. It’s basically a live podcast, with a host that tells bad jokes, a ton of padding, and set dressing because for some reason it is being put on TV instead of on the radio or in a podcast. And in that vein, its competition has huge advantages— cheaper format, not being bound to a time slot, cheaper hosts, no need for sets, costumes, or live music. Any decent comedian could do exactly what Kimmel and Colbert were doing at 1/10 or less the cost, and I don’t think the format of late night comedy shows makes sense.
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