There’s a new king in the world of late night comedy, and unless you’re a big fan of cable news, there’s a chance you’ve likely never heard of him. Since late August, Libertarian pundit Greg Gutfeld’s latest vehicle for the Fox News Channel, entitled Gutfeld! has routinely outpaced its late night competitors.
In recent weeks the show has averaged 2.1 million viewers per episode. Dethroning the previous late night king, CBS’ The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Gutfeld’s contrarian takes on the news of the day as well as his focus on producing politically incorrect comedy sketches, rather than celebrity driven viral videos which has ultimately helped attract younger viewers to Fox. A welcome departure for the cable news channel whose average viewer age is 68 years old.
So how is it that a late night comedy show, on cable, with a staff a fraction of the size of most late night crews, is able to rake in more viewers than all its network competitors, on a much smaller budget?
It’s certainly possible that after four years of a Trump driven news cycle, Americans are tired of hearing the same exact take and the same lazy formulaic jokes from every single late night host and want to hear a different perspective. Although that’s likely played a role in the ratings shift, there’s a much bigger reason, no one watches live network tv anymore.
With the golden age of streaming platforms and video sharing sites, there’s no good reason to be glued to your TV at exactly 10:34pm every night, hoping that something memorable happens. If something memorable does happen, you can always stream it the next day or catch clips of it on youtube.
Gone are the days of so-called “appointment television” and I look forward to one day telling my grandchildren of the horrors of it. “There was no Netflix or Hulu back then. If you missed your favorite TV show you had to either ask your friends what happened or hope that they’d re-air it soon!”
Nobody watches tv the old fashioned way. Networks know this and have adapted accordingly. Take for example my favorite sitcom of the 2010s: The Good Place. In its massively successful final season, it averaged 3.56 million viewers. In virtually any other era of television, a ratings score that low would’ve been the death knell for a major network sitcom. Yet NBC kept their faith in the show because they understood that more people watched the show the next day on Hulu and the now defunct NBC app, than the 3.56 million that watched it live.
After last week’s season premiere of SNL, the Sunday morning entertainment news cycle was inundated with cookie cutter article after article about how “SNL has suffered its lowest rated episode in history.” Despite what your middle aged uncle in the “More Cowbell” t-shirt says, SNL’s ratings aren’t low because the show “hasn’t been funny since he was in high school”, they’re low because the 18-34 audience the show is produced for, prefers to watch it on their own time rather than dedicating 90 minutes of their precious weekend to watching it live.
Live ratings are no longer an accurate barometer of a show’s success, and it’s time that we either develop a more modern system for accurately gauging a show’s viewership. One that takes all factors into account, or at the very least, we can stop pretending that the current ratings system is still relevant.
About Post Author
