Best Of

I like Colbert though I always preferred Stewart's style. However, the late night talk show always slanted towards an older audience. Back in the day it was common to hear about people catching Leno's monologue and then going to sleep. While the move to Colbert signals an obvious attempt to recapture the money demo 18-30 year olds. It'll be weird. NBC tried it with Conan too, but it alienated their core ratings driving audience. The audience didn't like it and as my mom would put it, "I just don't like that Conan guy. He's not funny at all." That audience bailed hard. NBC would have been okay with that if the 18-30 year olds actually jumped on but they didn't, and I have a hard time seeing them jumping on to the traditional talk show no matter the host. Even in his first week back and being promoted out the Asshole for his return to TV, Jimmy Fallon still had a larger audience than Colbert even in the key demo's.

I think talk shows can still work though. It just requires a complete revision of what a talk show is. Needs a fundamental shift. Shorten it a bit and make it faster paced. Shorten it down to the key stuff and then if there are some awesome interviews post those the next day online, like the Daily Show. The Daily Show and the Colbert Report while successful really only succeeded because they were given a lot more leeway and had fast hitting shows 30 minutes is easier to fill than an hour. They also started at 11 rather than 11:35. Since they were on cable expectations of viewership weren't as high.

Through 2015 the Daily show averaged between 1.15 and 1.3 million viewers a day including those streaming his show. It's big success was in the short clips the next day, that's how I believe most people consumed the Daily show and Colbert Report content. Late night with Seth Meyers who also goes up against Jimmy Kimmel and starts at 12:35 regularly pulls 1.7 million viewers.

This isn't to say Colbert is doomed, but he is going to have to try and recreate the ability for his clips to be digestible by people on the internet the next day. CBS will have to figure out a way to monetize as their video distribution system right now is pretty awful. Seriously, it won't even start if you have an adblocker running, at least it is on YouTube now. Again this will be at odds with Colbert and his audience though, as his satire through absurdity will probably offend a lot of people, but that is also what makes his stuff so watchable for us. He is going to have to walk a fine line as he panders to certain crowd while still trying to give the consumers like us who made Colbert as popular as he is today what we want. Shit he even had TV on the Radio on that episode he linked. That is pretty far away from mainstream.

It'll be interesting to see how this all plays out. I think he'll be fairly successful in his new gig but he will have to lose a lot what made us (18-35 year olds) like him. He'll just have to evolve and hopefully that won't make him any less funny. Unfortunately, to me he has lost a lot and his openings feel kind of stiff and not all that funny. I can see why @drasnor 's folks felt the way they did about him.

I kind of want a company, like say Amazon or Google since they seem to want to up their content, just to say fuck all and build an entirely online Brand show kind of thing. That would be a blend of comedy while also tackling more serious issues. Jon Stewart probably would have been the better bet, give him a huge amount of creative freedom, which seems to be something he would want. Colbert also could have worked. Since, Amazon and Google are already pretty well versed in content delivery and are already in the hands of tons of people it could work out really well. Let's say something like that does come to say Youtube as long as they don't region lock it suddenly you have a much larger potential audience. Basically I am just bored with the standard formats and just want some one someplace try an experiment.

One last fun viewership fact. The last episode of the Daily Show pulled 3.5 million viewers, or 1.2 million less than a Jimmy Fallon Monday.

P.S I really like television and spend a lot of time thinking about shit like this for some unknown reason.