Late Night Talk Shows

a drain on the network coffers and network credibility when they do not. For many years, the late night programming area was staid and unexciting. NBC's Tonight Show dominated the 11:30 time period, and for the last decade the same network's Late Night with David Letterman was also a high ratings winner. Other networks attempted talk shows at the late hour and floundered as Johnny Carson, host of the Tonight show for 29 years, continued to draw the bulk of the audience. A secondary franchise was created by the Iranian hostage crisis--Nightline on ABC came into being first as a nightly report on the hostage situation and then as a continuing late night news program with a strong core audience. Syndication was another challenge with hosts like Arsenio Hall trying to challenge the Carson hegemony, with only minimal success. All this changed in the Fall of 1993 as competition increased greatly with the move of David Letterman to CBS. An analysis of the situation in late night television today will contribute to a perception of the likely direction this programming will take in the future.

The audience for late night television has been developing since the beginning of the medium, and the nature of the programming and its audience has changed over that time from the night-owls of early television to a much broader audience today, an audience now much

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In the ratings from February 1992, the show averaged a 3.2 rating among females and 2.3 among males in the 18-34 age group. The highest ratings achieved by Hall came in February 1990 when the show achieved a 3.7 for females and 4.5 for males in the same category, but in the following two years the female audience declined 29 percent and the male audience 38 percent. Still, the Hall show did outperform The Tonight Show, Late Night with David Letterman, and the syndicated Dennis Miller Show in the 18-34 demo. Spending on late night television has increased over the years. The top ten advertisers on late night television ranked as follows in 1991, with their spending noted in millions of dollars: Sears, Roebuck $21.5 Philip Morris $20.5 Procter & Gamble $17.7 Annheuser-Busch $14.1 General Motors $12.8 AT&T $11.9 Toyota $11.3 Walt Disney Co. $10.6 Ford Motor Co. $ 9.1 Bristol-Myers/Squibb $ 7.9 Competition for this late-night money increased this fall as the first real competition faced by The Tonight Show in some time arrived when David Letterman changed from NBC to CBS and did so in order to get the 11.30pm time slot after having been passed over as Carson's successor in favor of Jay Leno
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2333
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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