When news stories fall through the cracks, we here at Colbert News Hub find them for a post we call, In The Press.
Hello hubsters! It’s been a little while, but I’m (finally) here with the February edition. What’s particularly interesting to me in putting these monthly press recaps together is noticing the ways in which the show is rapidly changing. One thing they’ve done a lot more of in the past few weeks is opening the show with a short film, or a musical number, or an oddly endearing sketch with Steve Martin instead of the monologue, which gives a great energy to those episodes. And they just seem to be including more pre-taped pieces and sketches in general. Despite these changes, a lot of the arguments made in the articles you’ll find here, whether positive or negative, still hold. I’ve already mentioned my frustration with the lack of point of view in the political segments and interviews, and you’ll find similar claims in some of these articles. One of the most interesting arguments also talks about how Stephen should perhaps embrace rather than distance himself from aspects of his character that were really, perhaps, aspects of his own personality. You’ll also find, among other things, February ratings stats, a video about the lighting of the Ed Sullivan Theater, and a behind-the-scenes look at Stephen’s short appearance at the Grammys.
Stephen Colbert
1. Stephen Colbert got revenge for Alexander Hamilton.
During the first rehearsal, Leslie Odom, Jr. (who plays Hamilton’s longtime rival, Aaron Burr) sang the first two lines of “Alexander Hamilton” before the cast was directed to hold and start again. As Odom walked offstage, host Stephen Colbert stalked behind him, holding his hand up as a gun. Revenge!
2. Colbert really wanted to know how the audience scored these tickets.
“Are you friends of friends, or were you really just ‘corralled’ off Broadway’?” he asked the folks in the front row.
3. Phillipa Soo (who plays Hamilton’s wife Eliza Schuyler) and Colbert goofed around onstage.
They took turns spreading their arms wide like presenters on a game show, then pushing in front of each other. Trust us, it was adorable.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
- Stephen Colbert Is Caught Between Himself And ‘Stephen Colbert’ – Uproxx
The argument the writer is making here is that Stephen has been stuck between interviewing as himself and interviewing as his character. It seems that there might be something to the idea that the character’s combativeness was not only the character’s; that there is in fact an opinionated and assertive aspect to the real Stephen. And owning that aspect would make Stephen an even better interviewer and host.
Yes, the political ideology is a character, but a lot of the personality we saw on screen is Colbert. Colbert has lightning fast wit and isn’t afraid to use it – which suited his “character” just fine. If something came off as “rude,” well, who cares, it’s just “the character.” The problem that Colbert is having now is that these mannerisms don’t really work when only done at half speed while not playing “a character.”
For Colbert, his interview style is muscle memory now. He’s done so many interviews where he can get away with whatever he wants because of “the character,” that it is now his default interview style. It’s obvious he’s dialed it back quite a bit, but this has created two problems: He’s not listening to his ingrained instincts and when he does, it’s so out of the blue, it all just comes off as awkward. (Or, as my mom would say, “mean.”) There are exceptions, like his in-depth interview with Joe Biden, but the number of interviews that don’t go as well outnumber them. …
But part of the reason I like Colbert so much is how he can bring smart and honest discussions to the table, and this version we have now seems so gunshy. He seems like someone who is questioning what attributes he should bring from his “character” and what he shouldn’t be bringing. But, again, Colbert as an interviewer is that character. On Wednesday night’s show, Colbert had Mark and Jay Duplass as guests, and Colbert just seemed a bit lost, like he’s in a constant tug-of-war with his instincts.
With certain guests (like when he had Trump on), I don’t think there would be anything wrong with letting the “full Colbert” come out, but we haven’t really seen that. We haven’t seen Stephen being Stephen. Colbert wants so badly to convince you that the guy on The Colbert Report was just “a character,” but the truth is we’re not going to see the Colbert we need until he embraces the side of the character that was him all along.
- Bart & Fleming: The Big Sundance Deals; Why Are Jon Stewart And Stephen Colbert Not Lacerating White House Candidates? – Deadline
I don’t entirely agree with this article … but in some ways I do. Again, I’ve already expressed my frustration with Stephen’s reluctance to be more open about his own opinions in political interviews. But, at the same time, I don’t feel like the Rumsfeld interview is necessarily a good example. It is true though that the lack of “distinct point of view” has been frustrating, and not just during interviews: unlike many of you, I’m not a big fan of the political desk pieces, including ‘The Hungry for Power Games’. Political comedy without a genuine, strong point of view seems a bit pointless to me…
Colbert got an early boost by corralling presidential candidates who were enamored of the Early Colbert mythology, when his persona was deftly masked behind that of a stodgy right wing asshole. But the new Colbert has become Late Night Bland – he has the big smile but no distinctive point of view. His interview last week with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a case in point – Colbert struggled so hard to advance a lucid question that his guest said, “Look, I’ll save you the embarrassment and ask the questions.” On a typical evening Colbert confronts the same list of Hollywood actors pushing their latest releases that has greeted every late-night host going back to Carson, but there are none of the oddball zealots who occasionally graced his previous show.
- What Time Is the Right Time For Watching Late Night TV? – Indiewire
The next few articles are reviews and stats of the post-Super Bowl episode. They also provide some insightful analysis of what makes the show work (or not) in general. The consensus seems to be that the Super Bowl episode didn’t manage (or try) to reintroduce the show in any remarkable way. My guess is that they’re still trying to figure out what the show’s voice is, and to find what strengths they can really play with… They’ll probably be much better with ‘big event’ episodes in the future. They were just so good at putting those together on The Colbert Report!
I just really loved [the Will Ferrell] segment. It’s one of those things where it’s easy for me to say that that was a great segment, that that was the best part of the episode — because I think it clearly was — but even if that was what opened it, it might have worked, but I think people would have been left just admiring Will Ferrell and not admiring Stephen Colbert. They didn’t seem to put a lot of emphasis on his personality, and there’s been some debate over that personality actually is, or what the strengths of it are, and what they need to be marketing towards. But I just didn’t feel like they tried that hard to get that in there. And, for as much as I enjoyed the show, it was more like, well, this just happened to be on a little earlier for me to watch it tonight and I did, but I’m not going to make it a priority any more than I had thought to before.
For CBS, it has to be a trifle irritating to have seen the initial enthusiasm and goodwill Colbert generated largely evaporate ratings-wise, leaving him well behind NBC’s inferior “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” That said, “Late Show” is doing well enough, and the network can derive some satisfaction from having a host who seems able to credibly pivot to more serious topics and guests – some of his interviews with presidential candidates have been substantive and first-rate – in a way that looks beyond Fallon’s lighter-than-air grasp.
The best portion of Sunday’s episode, in fact, fell into that category, with Colbert engaging Kelly in a too-brief discussion near the very end about her definition of feminism. Given some of the filler that occupied the hour, it was too bad by then they had run out of time.
Colbert’s conventional celebrity interviews, by contrast, tend to be a mixed bag. Perhaps not surprisingly, his strength remains the time he spends behind the desk after his monologue – the part of the show that most closely resembles his previous stint at Comedy Central.
At least on the major networks, Stephen Colbert can lay claim to the title of the smartest show in late night, which, as his predecessor David Letterman and plenty of high school kids have discovered, seldom translates into being the most popular. Still, if CBS was hoping to give him the equivalent of a Super Bowl bump, the bottom line is that Sunday’s less-than-super live edition won’t do much to help the cause.
When Colbert was able to push a bit against the boundaries of his show, he was fantastic, as when he brought new energy to the presidential cameo or when he allowed Will Ferrell, in fine form, to deconstruct the talk-show animal expert role. Ferrell, impersonating some demented version of Jack Hanna, showed off “exotic” animals like a “duck-bodied platypus” (of course, actually a duck). It felt like a clip meant to go viral, but one whose strength came from its knowledge of talk-show history, rather than, like Fallon’s karaoke bits, one that seeks to exist in its own context-free world. And Colbert’s interview with Megyn Kelly about her perceived “feud” with Donald Trump was satisfyingly substantial.
That Colbert was at his weakest when he was performing the bits of his show that were required felt like part of the price of admission for a host so good at interviewing and so knowledgeable about what makes talk shows good. This was an episode of a talk show put together by someone who understands what talk shows can do. Sure, almost no one watching at home had been working today, but at the end of an especially dull football game, the show’s non-sports content was mood-lifting without giving the exhausting feeling of striving for virality. …
Colbert seems torn, at present, between two selves; the guy who wants to talk politics with Megyn Kelly and weirdly subvert the history of TV talk, and the guy for whom the network arranges an interview with the Super Bowl MVP. (That the Von Miller interview literally interrupted Colbert’s sharp chat with Fey and Robbie seemed almost too perfect.) Colbert’s future would likely be even brighter if he could figure out a way to be, or to seem, excited about talking to anyone. But with that out of the question, giving a platform to a probing and odd intellect is something very special indeed.
In late-night on Monday, CBS’ “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” averaged a 0.7 rating among adults 18-49 in the 25 markets with people-meters, up 75% from its performance last Monday (0.4) and a competitive second to NBC’s “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” (0.9). The CBS program, coming off its live post-Super Bowl telecast which averaged a whopping 21.1 million viewers, also moved ahead of “Tonight Show” in overnight households (2.7 to 2.5), rising 23% from last Monday and its top regular-timeslot result since Oct. 6.
| Week |
Status |
18 – 49
Demo |
Demo
Ranking |
Overall
(Millions) |
Overall
Ranking |
| February 1 – 5 |
5 New
Episodes |
0.50 / 3 |
#3 |
2.50 |
#2 |
| February 8 – 12 |
4 New
Episodes |
0.55 / 3 |
#3 |
2.71 |
#2 |
| February 15 – 19 |
5 New
Episodes |
0.57 / 3 |
#2 |
2.74 |
#2 |
| February 22 – 26 |
4 New
Episodes |
0.46 / 3 |
#3 |
2.30 |
#2 |
- Letterman And Leno Fans Have Given Up On Late-Night TV, Says TiVo Research – International Business Times
Here’s an interesting breakdown of what late-night viewers watch now that The Colbert Report, Jon Stewart, Letterman and Jay Leno are off the air. 55% of Report viewers are watching The Late Show, as well as 60% of Jon Stewart viewers, 11% of Letterman’s… and 2% of Jay Leno’s (heh).
According to TiVo’s data, 69 percent of Letterman’s audience is nowhere to be found; only 11 percent of his devotees have followed “Late Show” into the era of Stephen Colbert, Letterman’s successor, who took the reins in September. …
[D]espite the man behind the desk of “Late Show With Stephen Colbert” being the same as the man behind the desk of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” only 55 percent of “Colbert Report” supporters took their fandom over to the “real” Stephen Colbert on CBS, indicating that a decent chunk of Colbert Nation prefers the persona to the man himself.
Meanwhile, the loss of most of a generation of late-night viewers doesn’t seem to be fazing NBC or CBS. Colbert’s “Late Show” audience, while regularly smaller than that of Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show” on NBC, does skew younger than Letterman’s, which is good for CBS’ ad sales team — advertisers covet viewers in the 18-49 age group, and since Colbert is doing better in that demo than Letterman, that counts as progress.
- The IBEW Presents Stephen Colbert – IBEW International
I don’t know about you, but personally I’m always happy when we get any behind-the-scenes content! This short video focuses on The Late Show’s new lighting and digital projections.
The Colbert Report
Here’s where it gets tricky.
Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow spent $395,194 on operating expenditures, or the costs needed to run the campaign.
Who received that money? Not many people have looked into that part of the Colbert super PAC, and this is where it gets interesting.
When Colbert decided to run for “the President of the United States of South Carolina,” he turned over the super PAC to Jon Stewart, who, in addition to hosting The Daily Show, was an executive producer of The Colbert Report.
Super PACs are not allowed to coordinate, consult with or take suggestions from candidates or their candidate committees. Yet, the expenses from the super PAC show they were paying a lot of people with obvious direct ties to The Colbert Report. This was likely an intentional way for the witty Colbert to satirize how a campaign could easily flout the “no-coordination” rule — and no one would question or investigate the super PAC’s activities. …
It’s important to point out that following the money for Colbert’s political finance groups was a long, long process. But despite the arduous amount of research we did, tracking the cash flow of Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow was actually much easier than it would be for almost every other case. Mr. Colbert flaunted his super PAC on cable television and left plenty of bread crumbs for journalists to follow; we knew where the money ended up and were able to fill in the gaps. Without these clues, it may have been simply impossible to track. Needless to say, few candidates for political office will be as generous — leaving the public in the dark.
Late Night
While CBS has improved its late-night ratings fortunes over the last five months with new “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert, Fallon hasn’t missed a beat. In fact, his 18-49 average through five weeks of 2016 (1.01 rating in Nielsen’s “most current” averages) is the same as a year ago when the lower-rated David Letterman fronted the “Late Show” franchise.
In the fourth quarter of 2015, Fallon beat Colbert by a 43% ratings margin in adults 18-49 (1.14 vs. 0.80) and a 23% advantage in total viewers (4.0 million vs. 3.3 million), according to Nielsen’s “live plus-7” estimates. And in “most current” numbers for the first quarter to date this year, those margins have increased to 74% in the demo (1.01 vs. 0.58) and 37% in overall audience (3.6 million vs. 2.7 million).
- What’s Causing The Crush Of New Late-Night Shows – Deadline
Stephen Colbert, James Corden, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Larry Wilmore, Conan, John Oliver, Bill Maher, soon Chelsea Handler (and I’m probably forgetting others) … The late-night field is expanding very quickly, but, apparently, is still ‘fairly wide open’ (?!).
The late-night formats that are being announced most noticeably “can live digitally as well as linear,” one pundit noted. The idea is to get it up, put it online and hope it goes viral. Odds of that are greatly increased by airing them in late-night, where networks “can experiment in content” without incurring the same advertiser push back to which they’re prone in primetime, the exec noted of the trend. “It’s important for any content provider, because that’s how younger viewers are consuming.”
He added, “For your brand to succeed, you can’t just live in a linear world.” …
Late-night TV is, contrary to the too-much-TV phenomenon of primetime, still a fairly wide open daypart, insist some.
None of the new players expects to draw as many late-night eyeballs as broadcast’s Jimmy, Jimmy or Stephen,” but as one industry observer noted: “This is a way to expand your empire. All these [cable] networks have concentrated on primetime, and late-night is the next logical place to concentrate and expand. These networks are getting more ambitious in programming but, largely, late-night shows are not expensive. It’s a pretty elastic program type compared to trying to produce, say, the next The Walking Dead. It’s a place where people see opportunity and not a lot of cost, compared to what some other genres cost.”
- Craig Ferguson and the Death of the “Talk” Part of Late Night Talk Shows – Splitsider
I think it’s interesting (perplexing?) that there’s no mention of Stephen considering that his interviews have been one of the most consistently interesting and noteworthy elements of The Late Show… But here’s an interesting take on the move away from interviews in late night.
In the early days of late night talk shows, the interview was often the part of the show where the audience would get to know a comic or celebrity more intimately. …
Carson and Dick Cavett were both skilled in the art of conversation. They knew when to let their guests speak and go off the rails and when to prod further. Sometimes, getting out of the way and just laughing was the best way forward, even for non-comedians. It made for a give and take that was often as entertaining as any game that gets played nowadays with whomever is invited to sit down. …
In the time since [Craig Ferguson]’s left late night, there is a definite void in great conversations. Certain guests can still bring out the best in various hosts, but on the whole, the interview segment often feels like an afterthought, just something that is required for the format and no longer embraced as truly essential. It’s telling that both John Oliver and Samantha Bee got rid of interviews completely in their shows.
In the Press – February 2016
Hello hubsters! It’s been a little while, but I’m (finally) here with the February edition. What’s particularly interesting to me in putting these monthly press recaps together is noticing the ways in which the show is rapidly changing. One thing they’ve done a lot more of in the past few weeks is opening the show with a short film, or a musical number, or an oddly endearing sketch with Steve Martin instead of the monologue, which gives a great energy to those episodes. And they just seem to be including more pre-taped pieces and sketches in general. Despite these changes, a lot of the arguments made in the articles you’ll find here, whether positive or negative, still hold. I’ve already mentioned my frustration with the lack of point of view in the political segments and interviews, and you’ll find similar claims in some of these articles. One of the most interesting arguments also talks about how Stephen should perhaps embrace rather than distance himself from aspects of his character that were really, perhaps, aspects of his own personality. You’ll also find, among other things, February ratings stats, a video about the lighting of the Ed Sullivan Theater, and a behind-the-scenes look at Stephen’s short appearance at the Grammys.
Stephen Colbert
1. Stephen Colbert got revenge for Alexander Hamilton.
During the first rehearsal, Leslie Odom, Jr. (who plays Hamilton’s longtime rival, Aaron Burr) sang the first two lines of “Alexander Hamilton” before the cast was directed to hold and start again. As Odom walked offstage, host Stephen Colbert stalked behind him, holding his hand up as a gun. Revenge!
2. Colbert really wanted to know how the audience scored these tickets.
“Are you friends of friends, or were you really just ‘corralled’ off Broadway’?” he asked the folks in the front row.
3. Phillipa Soo (who plays Hamilton’s wife Eliza Schuyler) and Colbert goofed around onstage.
They took turns spreading their arms wide like presenters on a game show, then pushing in front of each other. Trust us, it was adorable.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
The argument the writer is making here is that Stephen has been stuck between interviewing as himself and interviewing as his character. It seems that there might be something to the idea that the character’s combativeness was not only the character’s; that there is in fact an opinionated and assertive aspect to the real Stephen. And owning that aspect would make Stephen an even better interviewer and host.
Yes, the political ideology is a character, but a lot of the personality we saw on screen is Colbert. Colbert has lightning fast wit and isn’t afraid to use it – which suited his “character” just fine. If something came off as “rude,” well, who cares, it’s just “the character.” The problem that Colbert is having now is that these mannerisms don’t really work when only done at half speed while not playing “a character.”
For Colbert, his interview style is muscle memory now. He’s done so many interviews where he can get away with whatever he wants because of “the character,” that it is now his default interview style. It’s obvious he’s dialed it back quite a bit, but this has created two problems: He’s not listening to his ingrained instincts and when he does, it’s so out of the blue, it all just comes off as awkward. (Or, as my mom would say, “mean.”) There are exceptions, like his in-depth interview with Joe Biden, but the number of interviews that don’t go as well outnumber them. …
But part of the reason I like Colbert so much is how he can bring smart and honest discussions to the table, and this version we have now seems so gunshy. He seems like someone who is questioning what attributes he should bring from his “character” and what he shouldn’t be bringing. But, again, Colbert as an interviewer is that character. On Wednesday night’s show, Colbert had Mark and Jay Duplass as guests, and Colbert just seemed a bit lost, like he’s in a constant tug-of-war with his instincts.
With certain guests (like when he had Trump on), I don’t think there would be anything wrong with letting the “full Colbert” come out, but we haven’t really seen that. We haven’t seen Stephen being Stephen. Colbert wants so badly to convince you that the guy on The Colbert Report was just “a character,” but the truth is we’re not going to see the Colbert we need until he embraces the side of the character that was him all along.
I don’t entirely agree with this article … but in some ways I do. Again, I’ve already expressed my frustration with Stephen’s reluctance to be more open about his own opinions in political interviews. But, at the same time, I don’t feel like the Rumsfeld interview is necessarily a good example. It is true though that the lack of “distinct point of view” has been frustrating, and not just during interviews: unlike many of you, I’m not a big fan of the political desk pieces, including ‘The Hungry for Power Games’. Political comedy without a genuine, strong point of view seems a bit pointless to me…
Colbert got an early boost by corralling presidential candidates who were enamored of the Early Colbert mythology, when his persona was deftly masked behind that of a stodgy right wing asshole. But the new Colbert has become Late Night Bland – he has the big smile but no distinctive point of view. His interview last week with former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was a case in point – Colbert struggled so hard to advance a lucid question that his guest said, “Look, I’ll save you the embarrassment and ask the questions.” On a typical evening Colbert confronts the same list of Hollywood actors pushing their latest releases that has greeted every late-night host going back to Carson, but there are none of the oddball zealots who occasionally graced his previous show.
The next few articles are reviews and stats of the post-Super Bowl episode. They also provide some insightful analysis of what makes the show work (or not) in general. The consensus seems to be that the Super Bowl episode didn’t manage (or try) to reintroduce the show in any remarkable way. My guess is that they’re still trying to figure out what the show’s voice is, and to find what strengths they can really play with… They’ll probably be much better with ‘big event’ episodes in the future. They were just so good at putting those together on The Colbert Report!
I just really loved [the Will Ferrell] segment. It’s one of those things where it’s easy for me to say that that was a great segment, that that was the best part of the episode — because I think it clearly was — but even if that was what opened it, it might have worked, but I think people would have been left just admiring Will Ferrell and not admiring Stephen Colbert. They didn’t seem to put a lot of emphasis on his personality, and there’s been some debate over that personality actually is, or what the strengths of it are, and what they need to be marketing towards. But I just didn’t feel like they tried that hard to get that in there. And, for as much as I enjoyed the show, it was more like, well, this just happened to be on a little earlier for me to watch it tonight and I did, but I’m not going to make it a priority any more than I had thought to before.
For CBS, it has to be a trifle irritating to have seen the initial enthusiasm and goodwill Colbert generated largely evaporate ratings-wise, leaving him well behind NBC’s inferior “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” That said, “Late Show” is doing well enough, and the network can derive some satisfaction from having a host who seems able to credibly pivot to more serious topics and guests – some of his interviews with presidential candidates have been substantive and first-rate – in a way that looks beyond Fallon’s lighter-than-air grasp.
The best portion of Sunday’s episode, in fact, fell into that category, with Colbert engaging Kelly in a too-brief discussion near the very end about her definition of feminism. Given some of the filler that occupied the hour, it was too bad by then they had run out of time.
Colbert’s conventional celebrity interviews, by contrast, tend to be a mixed bag. Perhaps not surprisingly, his strength remains the time he spends behind the desk after his monologue – the part of the show that most closely resembles his previous stint at Comedy Central.
At least on the major networks, Stephen Colbert can lay claim to the title of the smartest show in late night, which, as his predecessor David Letterman and plenty of high school kids have discovered, seldom translates into being the most popular. Still, if CBS was hoping to give him the equivalent of a Super Bowl bump, the bottom line is that Sunday’s less-than-super live edition won’t do much to help the cause.
When Colbert was able to push a bit against the boundaries of his show, he was fantastic, as when he brought new energy to the presidential cameo or when he allowed Will Ferrell, in fine form, to deconstruct the talk-show animal expert role. Ferrell, impersonating some demented version of Jack Hanna, showed off “exotic” animals like a “duck-bodied platypus” (of course, actually a duck). It felt like a clip meant to go viral, but one whose strength came from its knowledge of talk-show history, rather than, like Fallon’s karaoke bits, one that seeks to exist in its own context-free world. And Colbert’s interview with Megyn Kelly about her perceived “feud” with Donald Trump was satisfyingly substantial.
That Colbert was at his weakest when he was performing the bits of his show that were required felt like part of the price of admission for a host so good at interviewing and so knowledgeable about what makes talk shows good. This was an episode of a talk show put together by someone who understands what talk shows can do. Sure, almost no one watching at home had been working today, but at the end of an especially dull football game, the show’s non-sports content was mood-lifting without giving the exhausting feeling of striving for virality. …
Colbert seems torn, at present, between two selves; the guy who wants to talk politics with Megyn Kelly and weirdly subvert the history of TV talk, and the guy for whom the network arranges an interview with the Super Bowl MVP. (That the Von Miller interview literally interrupted Colbert’s sharp chat with Fey and Robbie seemed almost too perfect.) Colbert’s future would likely be even brighter if he could figure out a way to be, or to seem, excited about talking to anyone. But with that out of the question, giving a platform to a probing and odd intellect is something very special indeed.
In late-night on Monday, CBS’ “Late Show with Stephen Colbert” averaged a 0.7 rating among adults 18-49 in the 25 markets with people-meters, up 75% from its performance last Monday (0.4) and a competitive second to NBC’s “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” (0.9). The CBS program, coming off its live post-Super Bowl telecast which averaged a whopping 21.1 million viewers, also moved ahead of “Tonight Show” in overnight households (2.7 to 2.5), rising 23% from last Monday and its top regular-timeslot result since Oct. 6.
Demo
Ranking
(Millions)
Ranking
Episodes
Episodes
Episodes
Episodes
Here’s an interesting breakdown of what late-night viewers watch now that The Colbert Report, Jon Stewart, Letterman and Jay Leno are off the air. 55% of Report viewers are watching The Late Show, as well as 60% of Jon Stewart viewers, 11% of Letterman’s… and 2% of Jay Leno’s (heh).
According to TiVo’s data, 69 percent of Letterman’s audience is nowhere to be found; only 11 percent of his devotees have followed “Late Show” into the era of Stephen Colbert, Letterman’s successor, who took the reins in September. …
[D]espite the man behind the desk of “Late Show With Stephen Colbert” being the same as the man behind the desk of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” only 55 percent of “Colbert Report” supporters took their fandom over to the “real” Stephen Colbert on CBS, indicating that a decent chunk of Colbert Nation prefers the persona to the man himself.
Meanwhile, the loss of most of a generation of late-night viewers doesn’t seem to be fazing NBC or CBS. Colbert’s “Late Show” audience, while regularly smaller than that of Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show” on NBC, does skew younger than Letterman’s, which is good for CBS’ ad sales team — advertisers covet viewers in the 18-49 age group, and since Colbert is doing better in that demo than Letterman, that counts as progress.
I don’t know about you, but personally I’m always happy when we get any behind-the-scenes content! This short video focuses on The Late Show’s new lighting and digital projections.
The Colbert Report
Here’s where it gets tricky.
Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow spent $395,194 on operating expenditures, or the costs needed to run the campaign.
Who received that money? Not many people have looked into that part of the Colbert super PAC, and this is where it gets interesting.
When Colbert decided to run for “the President of the United States of South Carolina,” he turned over the super PAC to Jon Stewart, who, in addition to hosting The Daily Show, was an executive producer of The Colbert Report.
Super PACs are not allowed to coordinate, consult with or take suggestions from candidates or their candidate committees. Yet, the expenses from the super PAC show they were paying a lot of people with obvious direct ties to The Colbert Report. This was likely an intentional way for the witty Colbert to satirize how a campaign could easily flout the “no-coordination” rule — and no one would question or investigate the super PAC’s activities. …
It’s important to point out that following the money for Colbert’s political finance groups was a long, long process. But despite the arduous amount of research we did, tracking the cash flow of Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow was actually much easier than it would be for almost every other case. Mr. Colbert flaunted his super PAC on cable television and left plenty of bread crumbs for journalists to follow; we knew where the money ended up and were able to fill in the gaps. Without these clues, it may have been simply impossible to track. Needless to say, few candidates for political office will be as generous — leaving the public in the dark.
Late Night
While CBS has improved its late-night ratings fortunes over the last five months with new “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert, Fallon hasn’t missed a beat. In fact, his 18-49 average through five weeks of 2016 (1.01 rating in Nielsen’s “most current” averages) is the same as a year ago when the lower-rated David Letterman fronted the “Late Show” franchise.
In the fourth quarter of 2015, Fallon beat Colbert by a 43% ratings margin in adults 18-49 (1.14 vs. 0.80) and a 23% advantage in total viewers (4.0 million vs. 3.3 million), according to Nielsen’s “live plus-7” estimates. And in “most current” numbers for the first quarter to date this year, those margins have increased to 74% in the demo (1.01 vs. 0.58) and 37% in overall audience (3.6 million vs. 2.7 million).
Stephen Colbert, James Corden, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, Larry Wilmore, Conan, John Oliver, Bill Maher, soon Chelsea Handler (and I’m probably forgetting others) … The late-night field is expanding very quickly, but, apparently, is still ‘fairly wide open’ (?!).
The late-night formats that are being announced most noticeably “can live digitally as well as linear,” one pundit noted. The idea is to get it up, put it online and hope it goes viral. Odds of that are greatly increased by airing them in late-night, where networks “can experiment in content” without incurring the same advertiser push back to which they’re prone in primetime, the exec noted of the trend. “It’s important for any content provider, because that’s how younger viewers are consuming.”
He added, “For your brand to succeed, you can’t just live in a linear world.” …
Late-night TV is, contrary to the too-much-TV phenomenon of primetime, still a fairly wide open daypart, insist some.
None of the new players expects to draw as many late-night eyeballs as broadcast’s Jimmy, Jimmy or Stephen,” but as one industry observer noted: “This is a way to expand your empire. All these [cable] networks have concentrated on primetime, and late-night is the next logical place to concentrate and expand. These networks are getting more ambitious in programming but, largely, late-night shows are not expensive. It’s a pretty elastic program type compared to trying to produce, say, the next The Walking Dead. It’s a place where people see opportunity and not a lot of cost, compared to what some other genres cost.”
I think it’s interesting (perplexing?) that there’s no mention of Stephen considering that his interviews have been one of the most consistently interesting and noteworthy elements of The Late Show… But here’s an interesting take on the move away from interviews in late night.
In the early days of late night talk shows, the interview was often the part of the show where the audience would get to know a comic or celebrity more intimately. …
Carson and Dick Cavett were both skilled in the art of conversation. They knew when to let their guests speak and go off the rails and when to prod further. Sometimes, getting out of the way and just laughing was the best way forward, even for non-comedians. It made for a give and take that was often as entertaining as any game that gets played nowadays with whomever is invited to sit down. …
In the time since [Craig Ferguson]’s left late night, there is a definite void in great conversations. Certain guests can still bring out the best in various hosts, but on the whole, the interview segment often feels like an afterthought, just something that is required for the format and no longer embraced as truly essential. It’s telling that both John Oliver and Samantha Bee got rid of interviews completely in their shows.