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Late Night: The Next Generation
by Sophia Banay
May 13 2008
May 13 2008
Bedtime TV is a very profitable niche, but the audience is older and aging. The fight for younger viewers is on.
NBC is playing a risky numbers game with Jimmy Fallon—and it ain't about the Nielsen's.
Next year, Conan O'Brien will replace the popular and all-around menschy Jay Leno as the host of NBC's The Tonight Show, and yesterday, Jimmy Fallon was anointed O'Brien's successor on the Late Show.
For a network accustomed to dominating the late-night arena—with Leno's mainstream appeal regularly trumping David Letterman's snide humor on CBS and ABC's Nightline, and O'Brien spanking ABC's Jimmy Kimmel and CBS' Craig Ferguson on their own late shows—the host shuffle is a surprising move.
Why, in the first place, displace Leno, a bastion of steady ratings? Industry gossip has Leno regretting his decision to hand the job over to O'Brien and contemplating jumping to another network, a move that would displease NBC greatly.
But it's a chance the network seems willing to take, and as for why—it's the numbers, stupid. And we're not talking about the ratings. Fallon's appeal is obvious: He's good-looking (in a comedian kind of way), funny, and young. And in this age of fragmented viewership, YouTube phenomena, and iTunes, the "young" part is the most important piece of the puzzle.
O'Brien is a proven youth-attractor, with the youngest average viewership among the late-night shows, at 47.3 years. Not quite frat boys, but strong compared to Ferguson's 50.2 and Kimmel's 49.7. In the earlier hour, Leno pulls in viewers of the ripe old average age of 54.3, while Letterman's crowd has a more youthful average of 52.6.
The age differences may seem minute, but younger viewers are more attractive than ever to advertisers in the digital age. NBC is increasingly trying to capitalize on mobile and online ad platforms, as it emphasized Monday in a "spotlight" presentation to advertisers.
Even Lorne Michaels, who was responsible for Fallon's appointment, acknowledges that "no one under the age of 18 comes home and turns on their TV before their computer."
Still, there are two sides to Fallon.
There's the Saturday Night Live Fallon. He joined the show in 1998 and eventually grabbed its brass ring, becoming the co-host, with Tina Fey, of the Weekend Update segment.
"The young kids think he's the cat's meow," says Caroline Hirsch, proprietor of Caroline's on Broadway, the comedy club where Fallon got his start performing stand-up in the mid-1990s.
Plus, "stand-ups really have much more going [for them] than the writer-producer or actor type," when it comes to talk-show jobs, says Hirsch. "They think fast. Their interviews are funnier."
Then there's the post-SNL Fallon—who doesn't seem to have done much besides appear alongside Drew Barrymore in Fever Pitch in 2005 and, more recently (and regrettably), in a much-YouTubed Pepsi commercial with fellow New Yorker Parker Posey in which the two danced spastically on the top of a taxicab.
"He strikes me as an unusual choice," says Russell Peterson, a visiting assistant professor in the department of American Studies at the University of Iowa, and the author of Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into A Joke, which was published this March.
"Fallon has a kind of likability," Peterson adds, "but I have my doubts about how well that likability will wear based on the fact that he hasn't had a real career since SNL ended."
And then there's the Simpsons episode—animated evidence of an anti-Fallon movement—in which Homer yells to his kids, "What are you two laughing at? And if you say Jimmy Fallon, I'll know you're lying!"
Next year, Conan O'Brien will replace the popular and all-around menschy Jay Leno as the host of NBC's The Tonight Show, and yesterday, Jimmy Fallon was anointed O'Brien's successor on the Late Show.
For a network accustomed to dominating the late-night arena—with Leno's mainstream appeal regularly trumping David Letterman's snide humor on CBS and ABC's Nightline, and O'Brien spanking ABC's Jimmy Kimmel and CBS' Craig Ferguson on their own late shows—the host shuffle is a surprising move.
Why, in the first place, displace Leno, a bastion of steady ratings? Industry gossip has Leno regretting his decision to hand the job over to O'Brien and contemplating jumping to another network, a move that would displease NBC greatly.
But it's a chance the network seems willing to take, and as for why—it's the numbers, stupid. And we're not talking about the ratings. Fallon's appeal is obvious: He's good-looking (in a comedian kind of way), funny, and young. And in this age of fragmented viewership, YouTube phenomena, and iTunes, the "young" part is the most important piece of the puzzle.
O'Brien is a proven youth-attractor, with the youngest average viewership among the late-night shows, at 47.3 years. Not quite frat boys, but strong compared to Ferguson's 50.2 and Kimmel's 49.7. In the earlier hour, Leno pulls in viewers of the ripe old average age of 54.3, while Letterman's crowd has a more youthful average of 52.6.
The age differences may seem minute, but younger viewers are more attractive than ever to advertisers in the digital age. NBC is increasingly trying to capitalize on mobile and online ad platforms, as it emphasized Monday in a "spotlight" presentation to advertisers.
Even Lorne Michaels, who was responsible for Fallon's appointment, acknowledges that "no one under the age of 18 comes home and turns on their TV before their computer."
Still, there are two sides to Fallon.
There's the Saturday Night Live Fallon. He joined the show in 1998 and eventually grabbed its brass ring, becoming the co-host, with Tina Fey, of the Weekend Update segment.
"The young kids think he's the cat's meow," says Caroline Hirsch, proprietor of Caroline's on Broadway, the comedy club where Fallon got his start performing stand-up in the mid-1990s.
Plus, "stand-ups really have much more going [for them] than the writer-producer or actor type," when it comes to talk-show jobs, says Hirsch. "They think fast. Their interviews are funnier."
Then there's the post-SNL Fallon—who doesn't seem to have done much besides appear alongside Drew Barrymore in Fever Pitch in 2005 and, more recently (and regrettably), in a much-YouTubed Pepsi commercial with fellow New Yorker Parker Posey in which the two danced spastically on the top of a taxicab.
"He strikes me as an unusual choice," says Russell Peterson, a visiting assistant professor in the department of American Studies at the University of Iowa, and the author of Strange Bedfellows: How Late-Night Comedy Turns Democracy Into A Joke, which was published this March.
"Fallon has a kind of likability," Peterson adds, "but I have my doubts about how well that likability will wear based on the fact that he hasn't had a real career since SNL ended."
And then there's the Simpsons episode—animated evidence of an anti-Fallon movement—in which Homer yells to his kids, "What are you two laughing at? And if you say Jimmy Fallon, I'll know you're lying!"
