As Kimmel’s suspension suggests, many aspects of the future of late night could lie outside of production teams’ control. As for the creative side, Camillo says, it’s up to writers, producers, and other talent to move past the 2000s-era late-night template. “I think that the product needs a metamorphosis,” she says. For starters, creators and execs need to figure out how to produce late-night shows designed for streaming—a challenge that has so far confounded everyone who’s tried it, besides perhaps John Mulaney. Although many viewers might not consider the comedian’s Everybody’s Live a proper late-night show (it airs weekly and steadfastly ignores current events), Wilmore praised Mulaney for breaking the rules in the same way genre leaders like Letterman have in the past.
In addition to experiments like Mulaney’s, Wilmore expects to see more ideologically driven shows like The Daily Show and, yes, Gutfeld! (Greg Gutfeld, who has proclaimed himself the king of late night and is No. 1 in the 10 p.m. Eastern Time slot—more than an hour before any of his competitors hit the air—has made a point of laughing at Late Show’s demise, and also has been less than sympathetic about Kimmel’s suspension: “People come up to me and go, ‘If you’re a comedian and you’re on TV, you should be upset by this.’ I’m not really,” Gutfeld said on Thursday’s show.)
As Black notes, content creators are also already finding new, cheaper ways to independently produce late-night-esque content. “I don’t think that that’s the preferred future,” she says, pointing out that audience fragmentation only makes it harder for anyone to hold a civic conversation. “[But] I think that we will probably go to a model where it gets smaller and smaller.”
On the financial side, a few forces could actually work in late night’s favor. For one thing, the genre easily lends itself to product placement—a lever many shows already pull to offset costs. Busy Philipps, who revived her defunct E! show on QVC+, could be a particularly useful model. And as Black points out, traditional late night also gives studios a promotional vehicle that exists entirely within their control.
Conover has no doubt that platforms like YouTube will continue to grow as well—and that as they do, they’ll absorb more and more of the entertainment market. As that happens, he wants to make sure the industry continues to pay workers fairly. It took decades for the linear TV industry to construct its ad model, set rates, and unionize, Conover says. Now the same needs to happen on the streaming side.
As YouTube channels get bigger and bigger, their sales process has to get more sophisticated as well. That means convincing advertisers to pay higher rates and attracting bigger brands. Right now, Conover says, the biggest late-night-adjacent YouTubers mostly trade in ads from direct-to-consumer brands like Squarespace and MeUndies. “They’re dick pills,” he says. “It’s still that kind of advertiser. Coke is not yet advertising on these channels.” If the genre’s ever going to be as profitable on the internet as it was on television, that will need to change.
Josh Gondelman, an alum of Last Week Tonight and Desus & Mero, worries that big streamers might test new formats as a way to skirt union regulations. “When you hear something like Ted Sarandos saying, ‘Oh yeah, we can see bringing premium video podcasts onto Netflix’—are these going to be union jobs, like TV talk shows are?” he wonders. “Or are people going to cultivate this new economy where they perform some kind of category fraud to avoid paying the crews and the writers what they would otherwise have to pay?”
Conover also refuses to blame audiences, new technology, or the shows themselves for studio executives’ failures. “If 5 million people are watching a show every single night and you’re not making money off of it, that’s your fault,” he says. “It’s your problem.”
Laura Bradley
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