The End of Late Night TV Steven Colbert was cancelled by CBS. This was done for serious financial reasons. The traditional Late Night model was invented by Steve Allen in 1954 then fine tuned by Jack Parr and taken to the heights of popularity by Johnny Carson. The format was perfected by Carson but still a 1954 idea that has been stale for decades.
It is over for good. It has no legs and much of it is due to Fox and the Gutfeld Show with an entirely different formula and low overhead. Let’s look at the publicly released general numbers. The three late night network shows run by Colbert, Kimmel and Fallon are each roughly getting around 1 million viewers per night with about 200,000 falling into thew so called “demo” age range (25-54) desired by advertisers. According to the trades the Colbert show was costing $100 million a year to produce and losing $40 million a year. Colbert was paid between $15-20 million, He had a staff of 200 people. It was actually ludicrous that this is allowed to continue. Since Colbert was the most successful of the three shows you can also assume that the losses at ABC and NBC are worse. Which brings us back to Gutfeld on Fox. The show is profitable and we are told the staff is not 200, but 30 people. And while CBS, NBC and ABC are available to over 300 million viewers Gutfeld is only available to 60 million cable subscribers. The comparison is stark as Gutfeld gets 2-3 million viewers and 400,000 in the “demo.” Twice as much as the big network shows. Some analysis will have Colbert as high as 1.9 million viewers, but not much more with the demo. Whatever the case the losses are untenable and hard to rationalize. When you compare the production values of any of the late night network shows to Gutfeld, they are obviously far superior if not extravagant. This stems from the good old days. Johnny Carson would routinely hit 17 million viewers a night with an all-time peak of 45 million. Exactly how the executives let this slip to an untenable 2-3 million for so long is incomprehensible. Podcasts do better and do not cost $100 million to produce. ABC and NBC will probably wait to see if their fortunes improve with the demise of Colbert, but if they were smart they’d get out now. It’s not 1954. | 
