If you haven't been following this, you've missed some interesting developments. Fallon has pulled far ahead of the competition. Even more dramatic, Letterman has fallen much farther behind in the key demographics. In the week studied in this analysis, Kimmel's re-runs beat Letterman's original shows in the 18-49 demo, and Letterman even finished with fewer 18-49 viewers than Seth Meyers, who is on an hour later. It's not exactly a glorious exit for the veteran Letterman to celebrate.
Tuesday, July 29, 2014
Late Night TV Ratings For July 14-20, 2014
Late Night TV Ratings For July 14-20, 2014
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I'll admit that I am depressed by Fallon's high ratings for dumbing down late night to the lowest level in history ("Tonight, Jack Paar welcomes Robert Frost for an epic game of beer pong!"). But Letterman's situation isn't as bad as all that. He's still drawing 2.19 million total viewers to Fallon's 3.59 million for second place overall. It's just that Dave's getting more of the older viewers with functioning brains, while Fallon is drawing the young stoners who are impressed by anything as long as it's stupid enough (i.e., the advertisers' target demographic).
ReplyDeleteTo me, the real story is that Seth Meyers is pulling 1.461 million viewers overall, only about 200K more than Craig Ferguson, despite having a lead-in that's 1.4 million viewers larger. He's holding on to only about 40% of Fallon's audience. Granted, a lot of them are falling asleep during the endless genuflections to the Roots; but still, Craig holds on to nearly 55 percent of Dave's audience, and according to the networks, we're all old geezers who pass out after the early bird special.
I still think Conan has the funniest show on late night with Kimmel close behind, and Ferguson is the best host. Craig's Jimmy Fallon fly makes me laugh harder than the real thing.