The Future Of Late Night Has Jimmy Kimmel 'Worried'

By Andrew Sanford | TV | August 13, 2024 |

By Andrew Sanford | TV | August 13, 2024 |

Families no longer sit around the radio in their living room to hear what Little Orphan Annie is up to. They don’t scour the newspapers for comics and sports stats. Going to the video store on a Friday night and watching what you rent for three days straight to get your money’s worth is a thing of the past. No one is venturing to an outdoor venue to hear the local storyteller perform epic poetry for hours. Things change! Especially when it comes to entertainment. That doesn’t make it any easier to handle.

I don’t think the time I live in is special (aside from the fact that I’ve existed at the same time as Weird Al). It does, however, feel like I’ve lived through a lot of change. Things that were the norm for decades have been disappearing from my life. From physical media to network TV (and, ya know, there have been some political and cultural changes as well), how we consume entertainment has changed a lot in my (relatively) small amount of time on this planet. According to Jimmy Kimmel, more change is to come.

Kimmel has been a network TV guy since jumping from the still-thriving radio business. Since then, he’s pretty exclusively been a host. He started as the dry host of Win Ben Stein’s Money. That led to The Man Show, a program I am still amazed existed. From there, Kimmel became a late-night host at ABC. It is there that he has hit his stride. He has become a fixture on the network, even hosting the Oscars on several occasions. He’s currently under contract through 2025, but he is worried about what he’ll do next.

Kimmel recently sat down with the Politickin’ podcast. He discussed several topics, but of course, waded into the state of late night. “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,” Kimmel posited. “There’s a lot to watch and now people can watch anything at any time, they’ve got all these streaming services. It used to be Johnny Carson was the only thing on at 11:30 pm and so everybody watched and then David Letterman was on after Johnny so people watched those two shows, but now there are so many options.”

As Kimmel admits, it’s not even that people aren’t watching late-night comedy anymore. There is still a taste for it. What’s different is that it no longer has to be appointment viewing. “Maybe more significantly, the fact 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.”

The shift is concerning to someone like Kimmel. Hosting is what he does. He’s venturing out to other projects, but as he explains, there’s a reason he keeps signing contract extensions. “I will have a hard time when it’s over. It worries me. That’s part of the reason I keep going,” Kimmel said. “Each time, I think this is going to be my last contract and then I wind up signing another contract, it’s because I fear that day, that Monday after my final show, where it’s like ok, now what am I going to do? There aren’t a huge amount of options for late-night hosts after the shows are over. People think of you like a late-night talk show host, it’s not like you are suddenly going to start starring in films.”

We’ve already seen this process begin. When James Corden exited the late-night scene, CBS replaced him with a game show. Amber Ruffin wasn’t pulling in significant streaming numbers, so NBC did away with her new, exciting talk show. The format is on its way out. It may be a good thing or a bad thing, but really, it’s just a thing. Things change all the time. Sometimes, you just have to deal with it, as you slowly but surely shuffle toward the grave (or wherever people will be buried in twenty years).