Can Late-Night TV As We Know It Survive A Long Writer’s Strike?

With little more than a day left before the Writers Guild of America’s contract with Hollywood studios and streaming services expires, a much-feared strike looks increasingly likely, the first since a paradigm-shifting 100-day stoppage back in 2008.

Among the immediate stoppage victims would be the broadcast networks’ late-night talk shows, which depend heavily on topical humor and daily output from their busy writers rooms. Next in line for disruption would be weekly, highly topical programs such as Saturday Night Live, This Week with John Oliver, and Real Time with Bill Maher.

But in fact, all of those shows, particularly the nightly network ones, were already facing complicated futures thanks to fast-shifting viewership habits, especially among the younger audiences that advertisers most want to reach.

Change is hitting media companies and business models across not just Hollywood – where still more layoffs thumped Disney, Amazon
AMZN
, Paramount Global and others in recent days – but also social media.

Business ventures and entire models spawned in the 2010s are shutting down in the 2020s. Just look at the demise this past week of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Buzzfeed News, taking 160 jobs with it, and Red Table Talk, the last show in Meta’s expensive foray into long-form, commissioned programming through Facebook Watch.

The streaming services, with the exception of deep-pocketed Apple
AAPL
and Amazon, are pulling back from the spendthrift days of the early pandemic, when chasing market share and subscriber adds was more important than turning profits.

Billions of dollars in losses later, most mediacos have pulled back sharply on spending as they try to get to break even on streaming by 2024. Even Netflix
NFLX
, which reported around $3 billion in positive free cash flow for 2022, signaled in its recent earnings call that it plans to spend slightly less than last year’s $17 billion bill on original programming in 2023.

The pot-stirring analysts over at LightShed Entertainment even suggested in an April 17 note that a long writers strike might be good news for Paramount+ and Warner Bros. Discovery’s soon-to-be-relaunched HBO Max. A long strike would give both second-tier services a breather from content spending, allowing them to generate something closer to positive FCF from their deep libraries of older movies and TV shows.

The stunning departures last week of CNN’s Don Lemon and, especially, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson also felt like the end of yet another media era, the 24/7 cable news network with an intensely partisan prime-time take on everything (but mostly Donald Trump).

CNN has already tacked to the center, pushed by board member John Malone and CEO David Zaslav, while Fox News must worry even more about being outflanked on its right by upstarts such as One America News Network.

But the real Dead Shows Walking may be what’s left among the ranks of late-night talkers.

Even without a sustained strike, which many fear given the WGA’s pugnacious stance and the complicated issues separating the two sides, lesser late-night shows have been steadily dying off. Conan O’Brien, Samantha Bee, Desus & Mero, and Larry Wilmore all saw late-night ventures end in recent years.

The ranks thinned further Thursday night, after James Corden presided over his last episode of The Late Late Show with a star-studded bang. The 12-time Emmy winner won’t be replaced, only succeeded by @midnight, a retreaded (and very cheap) game show that ran between 2013 and 2017 on CBS corporate sibling Comedy Central.

Comedy Central has its own late-night shoes to fill; the Daily Show has been without a permanent anchor since Trevor Noah departed in December for a far more lucrative gig as an internationally popular stand-up comedian.

Those holes in the late-night lineup are emblematic of the bigger business issues facing the daypart.

When Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Fallon took over the late-night chairs at their respective networks, they subtly shifted their approach to programming. Now, they focus on snackable bits of comedy and celebrity conversation that can be easily and profitably shared across social media for people who can’t be bothered to stay up late, or to even watch broadcast and cable television.

The late-night talk show has otherwise changed little since since the 1950s heyday of Jack Paar, with the worthy exception of Corden’s award-winning Carpool Karaoke, which even spawned one of three spinoff shows from his operation, among other money generators. Corden’s last episode fittingly included a final round of songs in the van with Adele, while former competitors try to devise knockoffs they can employ in the future.

Meanwhile, Facebook, Instagram, Snap and YouTube haven’t gone anywhere (though Twitter appears to be in steep decline). All are trying to keep up with the new kid, TikTok, whose deconstructed 15-second content hits barely leave time to get a punchline across, never mind an extended skit from a broadcast show.

And that’s where young audiences can be found these days (and on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels, their parent companies’ CEOs like to point out in earnings calls).

The strike may put an exclamation on what’s turning into an inflection point for media and social media of this era. The big broadcast late-night shows may indeed come back even from a lengthy writers strike. But it seems unlikely they’ll stick around for a long time after, especially after Kimmel, Fallon, Colbert and Seth Myers head off to other ventures or well-deserved retirements.

Even Corden’s showrunners, Ben Winston and Rob Crabbe, told the Hollywood Reporter in a retrospective interview that they think it’s unlikely another upstart late-night host will pop into pop-culture consciousness, given the expensive marketing push and short leash such a show would face.

“…in the environment that we are in, it’s going to be very difficult to find someone who can do what James has done — to find somebody who has that ability, somebody who isn’t the most expensive star in the world because no one knows who they are, to come here and generate the income that he has, whether it be with spinoffs or merch or international sales or product placement or all of the things that we’ve done to make The Late Late Show work,” Winston said. “I think to do that again is near impossible.”

Perhaps some of those striking writers can polish up their game-show format writing while walking the picket line. That may be their best chance of finding a niche on late night in coming years.