We talk a lot on this blog about late night TV shows. Here's an interesting — to me, at least — thing that's changed about them over the years. This is true of all of 'em but we'll just look at the guest lineup for The Tonight Show last week…
Notice that Mr. Fallon's show had reruns on both Thursday and Friday. That's not that new. Mr. Carson usually slipped a rerun or two into a week of (otherwise) new shows, though he always placed them on Monday or Tuesday. What's changed is that while Johnny's reruns were usually around a year old, late night shows now select their reruns from the previous week or two. One of Fallon's on this list is but 16 days old and the other is from earlier the same week.
Re-airing this particular Monday show on Friday makes sense, I guess, since having the Knicks on is so topical and special. But one of the things that has changed over the years about talk shows is that audiences won't watch reruns that are very old. Both Leno and Letterman tried it and the ratings were disastrous. You'd think that an old show would do better because people had forgotten all or most of it…but the ratings showed just the opposite.
Which is why this week when Jimmy Kimmel is in reruns, they're all from this month. The oldest one airing this week is from June 2. On Friday this week, they're rebroadcasting the episode from June 18th.
So let's ask why audiences won't watch older episodes. The only answer I can think of is that the main thing people now want from their late night shows is topicality. They don't want to hear jokes about last year's news, only recent news. Colbert's show — which had the highest ratings of all the late night shows — was arguably the most topical. What's more, Colbert came across as a guy who followed current events and understood them about as well as anyone in his position could. Whenever I see Jimmy Fallon deliver a monologue joke about current events, he seems like a guy who's just reading it off cue cards and who's more interested in getting to the part of the show where they all play Password.
I think The Internet has made us all more aware of what's in the news. I was going to type "more informed," but clearly, a lot of people are not particularly informed though they may think they are.
And this week, Seth Meyers has a week of reruns and they're reaching back farther than they usually do. One episode they're airing is from last December and the rest are from last January. I suspect that's an experiment. And I also suspect it will fail and they'll go back to rerunning more recent shows.