Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien have been all over the news lately because – well, because their popularity seems to be tanking. NBC tried Leno earlier and that didn’t work, and Conan in Leno’s spot apparently didn’t work either. I say apparently because I gave up watching these guys years ago. Don’t you think that old format is tired and maybe now is the time to put it out to pasture. In fact I think the late night talk show has been dead for sometime. It just hasn’t realized it yet.
Ho hum, it’s another “monologue”. More Tiger Woods jokes, how boring. And tonight there’s a selection of second-string actors plugging their movies and tv shows, and maybe a performer playing with the house band. The world has changed. Time to give it up and get another idea.
27th Street 
Like the others, I agree the format is dead. And why does it seem like they’ll give anyone a talkshow these days? Remember when it was Leno and Letterman? Or, and this is dating me, just Carson on late night? Now, with a deluge of talk shows featuring Jimmy Kimmel, some not so funny British Guy, and god knows how many others, who wants to watch the same thing on every channel. People have clued in and are tuning out.
I don’t know who watches these shows aside from insomniacs! Even when I was an insomniac I didn’t watch them. Well, I saw a few episodes of Conan and thought he was hilarious, but not enough to stay up that late!
I think you are right about the format being old, tired, and likely dead. The problem is that there isnt much else that the networks can replace them with. The number of viewers at that time of night is quite small and to be profitable they have to make the programs for late late night on the cheap. The guests are paid union scale which last I heard was $550 so 4 guests will set them back $2200. Compare that to the outrageous cost of real actors making a cops and robbers program or a sitcom. At the end the cast of Friends was raking in $500,000 each for each episode. That is serious coin. It is this huge disparity between the cost of a real program and basically free performers which has led the networks to push reality shows down everyone’s throats. A whole season of Survivor might have a prize of $1 million but that is almost nothing compared to spending the million on 15 minutes of salaries for 1 episode of Friends. The nature of television has changed over the years and the cost to produce programs with actors is so high that producing them becomes a serious risk. I don’t enjoy reality shows at all and they have driven me away from watching tv almost totally. Perhaps the problem is cable. When I was a kid we had a choice of 3-4 over the air channels and the commercials were each seen by a fairly large audience. Now a cable subscriber can get 200++ channels and an advertiser will be lucky to have 2-3% of the views his ads might have received 30 years ago.
I have no clue what the solution might be but I agree that Leno and O’Brien aren’t setting the world on fire and really I dont enjoy any of the other late night hosts either.
I will admit to enjoying some food shows, and home reno shows and that kind of thing. Is that reality programming. Interestingly enough a few choice bits of programming have emerged in the past few years. I’m thinking for instance, of The Wire and Mad Men to name two remarkable and imaginative series.