NEW YORK — The late-night television landscape used to be fairly easy to describe: There was Jay Leno, David Letterman and everybody else. Now, it just seems, there’s everybody else.
Late-night TV is losing audience and influence just as the time period has a breadth and quality of material it has never before had, with Conan O’Brien’s TBS show that started this month as the latest example.
Leno and Letterman, both in the twilight of their television careers, are still the most popular performers. But O’Brien, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Craig Ferguson, Jimmy Fallon, George Lopez and Chelsea Handler all have rabid fan bases.
“There are a lot of viable options out there,” said David Campanelli, vice president and director of national television for Horizon Media, who purchases TV advertising time for clients. “I don’t have to go to one or two places to spend my late-night money.”
NBC’s Leno topped the ratings for 14 years before NBC replaced him at the “Tonight” show in 2009 with O’Brien, and sent Leno into prime time. The move proved disastrous, and Leno was back in his old job within a year.
Leno immediately reclaimed the top spot in the ratings from Letterman. But this fall the competition between the two has been tight.
Leno has averaged 3.7 million viewers a night through eight weeks of the season, the Nielsen Co. said. Letterman is right behind at 3.6 million. Leno has been on top six of the eight weeks. Since two autumns ago when they went head-to-head, Leno’s audience is down 23 percent while Letterman is up 3 percent.
What happened to Leno’s fans? There may be some lingering bad feelings among viewers over O’Brien’s exit, when Leno was criticized for taking back a job he never really wanted to leave in the first place. Maybe casual fans simply got out of the habit of watching “Tonight” during Leno’s absence. NBC’s prime-time struggles may have finally caught up with him. It is likely a combination of all three.
“No one sees Leno as the big player anymore — the one show you have to be on,” Campanelli said. “‘The Tonight Show’ used to be the one you had to be on.”
Stewart and Colbert do lead in buzz — the watercooler moments that are hard to measure but make them more influential than their audience size would suggest.
Many of the other contenders are bunched up in the ratings so far this season, each with his own audiences and constituencies. Ferguson is averaging 1.8 million viewers following Letterman on CBS, and Fallon has 1.7 million after Leno on NBC. ABC’s Kimmel also averages 1.7 million, and has been getting strong word-of-mouth. Even though he moved back an hour, Lopez averaged 1.1 million viewers for the first week he followed O’Brien on TBS. Handler on E! Entertainment’s “Chelsea Lately” gets just under 1 million.
The late-night talent is an abundance of riches that some in the industry quietly believe will never happen again. Within that group could be Leno and Letterman’s replacements. But will it matter?
