bryan bedder/getty images
David Letterman’s ratings have held steady, despite the ongoing TV and movie writers’ strike.
STRUCK DUMB – LIGHT AT THE END OF THE TUNNEL? Striking TV and movie writers are set to sit down and try to end the strike that’s crippled Hollywood in a week, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times last Friday. The two parties are returning to negotiations, though there’s been no signs of either side budging on the issue of royalties for digital downloads, and writers will walk the picket lines until then.
The programming most hurt by the strike right now are the late night talk shows, which have been forced into reruns by the strike, causing collateral damage to the movie business, which relies on Leno, Letterman and the like to help publicize their holiday season releases by booking their stars to appear on the shows. It’s no surprise then that, according to a Wall Street Journal story, the late night show hosts are trying to soften up network executives to make concessions at the bargaining table.
“The hosts are in a unique position of power,” according to the Journal. “They have close relationships with the networks and media executives, who have spent years wooing them with huge salaries and fancy perks. Late-night shows are extremely lucrative for the networks, while costing little to produce; their biggest costs by far are the hosts’ salaries.”
The economic effect of the strike on the late night shows has taken a while to be measured, but according to an article by the indispensable Lisa de Moraes of the Washington Post, the results were a bit of a surprise. ABC’s late night news show Nightline was expecting to reap sheaves of stray viewers rendered rootless by the late night reruns, it seems, but that wasn’t how things worked out. Only 300,000 new viewers decided to catch up on the issues after the chat show sets went dark, while viewership for Leno’s reruns dropped a million pairs of eyes and Stephen Colbert’s show dropped to below a million viewers.
Over at CBS, however, David Letterman’s ratings held steady, despite the stale programming, and even showed an increase in viewers in the precious (you’re supposed to hiss the word out to get the proper effect) 18-49 demographic actually increased. Keep this in mind when you read in Variety that the late night hosts are in talks behind the scenes to agree when they’ll return, writer-less, to the air.
No one wants to jump the gun and hit the air first, so a handshake agreement on returning on the same night is being discussed. Remember this the next time someone tries to tell you that the entertainment business is only interested in profits – the reason why so many people in Hollywood believe in conspiracy theories is that they can’t imagine anything happening any other way.
Rick McGinnis writes about music, movies, books and television, but not opera. He walked 47 miles of barbed wire and has a cobra snake for a necktie.
