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I'm David Brown and this is Business Wars.

As our series on The Late Night Wars comes to a close, we are looking to the future. Gone are the days when millions would tune in like clockwork to catch an opening monologue.

Now, late nights less about the time slot and more about the formula. And who can get their sketches to go viral online. Plus, there are more hosts and shows than ever before.

But overall, the field is still dominated by straight white men. There's more diversity now in late night than even just 10 years ago. But still, quite a long way to go.

For more, we're talking with Meredith Blake. She is an entertainment reporter at the Los Angeles Times who covers television. We'll discuss how the genre of late night is staying relevant to the age of TikTok and Gen Z. All that's coming up next.

Meredith Blake, welcome to Business Wars. Thanks for having me.

And well, thank you so much for doing this. The television landscape, man, you think about how much it's gone through since the 1970s. I mean, you have streaming, of course, YouTube and all kinds of other social media platforms. And I guess it raises the question for us now. What makes a late night show?

A late night show. I mean, and I suppose wrapped up in that question is what was a successful late night show back then? Well, how does it compare with a successful late night show now?

In the 70s or even in the 80s and early 90s, there was really only one late night show. And that was the tonight show, it's Johnny Carson. And when he retired in 1992, it really set off a chain of events that's still continued to unfold.

And so we had once he retired that instigated a late night war between J Leno and David Letterman on rival networks. And then over the past 10 years, we've seen another changing of the garden late night and a real proliferation across a number of different networks, cable network streaming networks, a whole new generation of hosts trying to sort of take over.

It's interesting because yeah, there was so much bound up in the idea of must see TV right now, you know, you had to be sitting there on your couch. You had to be one of the 15 million tuning in or you kind of missed out. Of course, that's not the case. And yet the water cooler conversation, whatever happens the next day, that really seems to be what it's all about. That still is a big part of the success mix for late night.

It is, I guess now viewers have a built in advantage that they can watch whatever people are talking about at the proverbial water cooler back at their desk when no one's looking, you know what I mean.

You don't have to be parted from the TV at 1135 anymore. And you know, it's given I think late night a really essential opportunity for growth at a time when a lot of TV audiences are contracting, but it's also complicated.

What it means to be to be in late night and it's, you know, means that you're getting smaller real time audiences in general.

Yeah, I wonder if that has an effect on just how culturally relevant late night TV is. And by the way, since we are still talking about late night TV, are we talking about those programs normally scheduled to run in the Eastern time zones at or about 1130 PM.

We are to some extent. I mean that has expanded, you know, it's we've got shows that air well into the night shows that started after well after midnight. We've got some shows that started 10 PM. And then we have shows on streaming networks that don't really, you know, conform to any typical times locked that you consume on demand.

So it's it's really become a lot slipperier in that in that regard. Interesting because I'm thinking of the late night hosts, right. These are the people who in a way are the inheritors of the mantle, you know, left by Carson. If you want to follow that down, which is something we've been sort of trying to dig deep into.

Of course, Fallon comes to mind, Stephen Colbert, right. Who else are we talking about? We're talking about Jimmy Kimmel. No doubt. Jimmy Kimmel. You have Seth Myers. You have kind of, you know, you have a bunch of sort of the next generation of the daily show like Trevor Noah, who hosts the daily show. You have John Oliver. You have Samantha B. So it's there's really kind of a lot of iterations of this next generation, I guess is one way of putting it.

It's interesting. Is there a commonality to the voice or the sound, right. I mean, it sounds like at least one small dollop of snark if that's not understating it. But I think that's part of the sort of letterman heritage, if you will.

I think that's a fair way of putting it. I would I sort of look at it as there are sort of descendants of John Stewart, because you know, you look at the late night landscape now, and you have John Oliver who wins the Emmy every year. You have Samantha B. You have Stephen Colbert, who's now hosting, who took over David Letterman show, who of course started on the daily show.

So they tend to have more politically charged humor, you know, they have a more of a strong kind of political viewpoint, especially the last four years of the Trump administration. And then you have another kind of even Seth Myers, I would say kind of put him in that category.

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