This Week in Gossip #37

Late night is dying, Paramount is falling apart, and Katy Perry is in her 30 Rock Era (derogatory.)

Jimmy Kimmel Worries that Late Night TV is Dying

A lot of network television has suffered in the past twenty years as the model for at-home entertainment changes and our options become more plentiful. The big four still rule the roost in terms of ratings, if not prestige, but everyone is fighting for a smaller sliver of attention. One place where the shift has been particularly felt is late night. Once upon a time, talk shows ruled the roost and were appointment viewing, even with their midnight-adjacent time slots. That’s changed drastically in the past five or so years. When James Corden left The Late Late Show, CBS replaced him with a comedy panel show. Seth Meyers’ band is leaving his late night show because of costs. Now, Jimmy Kimmel is getting candid about the possible endgame for the format.

Kimmel recently sat down with the Politickin’ podcast (via Pajiba – read our site!), where the topic of late night came up. He admitted, "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. There’s a lot to watch and now people can watch anything at any time." He says that there's still a hunger for late-night comedy and interviews, but it's just something you catch up on later rather than live. "The act 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.”

It's true. Granted, I'm not American but I mostly consume this stuff on YouTube, as do most of my friends. Kids, we have work in the morning! There’s a generation of people who just don’t watch live TV of any format. The thing Kimmel talks about here is a years’ long issue, and we saw how many hosts and producers tried to respond to it with those deliberately viral moments. Jimmy Fallon turned The Tonight Show into a cavalcade of children’s party games, as did Corden. The YouTube views were good but one wonders if the benefits evened out. Apparently not for Corden because one of the reasons he and CBS parted ways was because his bits were so pricey to mount.

If the late-night format is flourishing anywhere, it’s online. Stuff like Hot Ones and Chicken Shop Date are 100% derived from classic talk shows and their gimmicks. You just know that Fallon is kicking himself for not coming up with Hot Ones first. Those shows are also good because the interviews are stellar. Their hosts are savvy, good at improv, well-researched, and have guests who are up for anything. Audiences gravitate towards that energy. There are few things more awkward than a late-night interview where the host clearly doesn’t care about the guest or didn’t do their research in time.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see someone like Kimmel branch out in the same way that Conan O’Brien has successfully done. Those guys will all be fine (and they’re still pretty much all guys in 2024.) But I do think we need some old-school interview formats for fun guests. We can’t make them all fall into intestinal distress with hot sauces.

Yikes: Paramount Television Studios Shut Down as They Prepare for Skydance Merger

Paramount Television Studios, a production facility originally aimed at getting Paramount Pictures to keep up with the era of peak TV, will soon be no more. It's going to shut down as part of Paramount Global's latest cost-cutting measures.

“This has been a challenging and transformative time for the entire industry, and sadly, our studio is not immune,” said Nicole Clemens, president of the unit (via Variety.) Paramount Television Studios was responsible for series like The Offer, Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan, and the recent revival of Time Bandits. They're all, as you can see, related to big IPs that Paramount owns. Aside from Jack Ryan, none of these were exactly mega-hits (did you even know that Taika Waititi did a Time Bandits show that's currently on Apple TV+?) It was an attempt by Paramount to move back into TV, which they once dominated.

The studio was responsible for some of the most iconic shows ever made, like Star Trek. But in the Too Much TV era, they struggled to keep up. We’ve seen a lot of studios and distributors try to get into streaming and the results have not been good. Even the head honchos like Netflix are floundering. Paramount+ has never felt like a necessity unless you’re a Yellowstone devotee (which, in fairness, many people are.) It was clearly a cash drain for a company that’s been in trouble for a while.