A Tree Falls in Late Night

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Good evening, I’m Dylan Byers. Welcome back to In The Room, my biweekly private email on the media industry. Tonight, a look at what Trevor Noah’s sudden, though perhaps not unexpected, departure from The Daily Show reveals about the inexorable decline of broadcast television—and what it portends for the future of late night programming, itself.

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A Tree Falls in Late Night

Trevor Noah, not even 40, is the latest star to pull the plug on his own late night show—once again proving that the linear big bang has landed after 11:30, and may soon upend Colbert, Fallon, and Kimmel, too.

DYLAN BYERS

Every year, in May, Jimmy Kimmel stands on a stage at Disney’s upfronts and artfully and hilariously skewers the nation’s biggest television advertisers for once again spending more money to reach fewer viewers. In 2010, he quipped that network television wasn’t losing ground to cable, but rather gaining on newspapers. In 2013, he compared broadcast TV to Apple—only in the sense that their products got smaller every year. In 2018: “Our ratings are going down and our prices are going up. Too bad, eat it!” In 2019: “You obviously have a lot of choices for how and where to throw your money away. We hope you throw your money away on us.” And this year: “Somehow, even though ratings are down, ad spending for broadcast television was up 37 percent in the first quarter of this year. How is that possible? The more viewers we lose, the more money you give us. What kind of message is this sending?”

The jokes always land, of course, because Kimmel is a uniquely talented and affable host. But as one veteran television executive told me...

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