Former Saturday Night Live star and Late Night host Jimmy
Fallon entered broadcast history this week beginning his tenure as the sixth
host of The Tonight Show, NBC’s venerable late night institution. Surrounding the departure of Jay Leno and the
arrival of the younger, more tech-savvy Jimmy Fallon, has been a lot of hype over
how the younger-leaning Fallon will do against the well-established competition
on CBS and ABC. David Letterman is the
old guard on the late night scene and the last standing ‘warrior’ of the so
called ‘late night wars’ now that Leno has left the airwaves. It's Jimmy Kimmel, however, who has been making waves at 11:30
ever since he was moved up from his midnight time slot just last year. Ever since Kimmel started competing with the ‘big
boys’ directly, he’s been making large strides building on the younger
demos. This is the reason behind
NBC’s decision to put Leno out to pasture (again): despite the fact that he was
still the ‘leader in late night’ in the ratings, his younger demos continued to
shrink and that was leading to decreasing profits for the late night
institution.
The key to Jimmy Kimmel’s success is no secret and it’s a large
part of why Jimmy Fallon was chosen to succeed the older-skewing Leno on The
Tonight Show perch. Kimmel and Fallon share
a great talent for creating great viral content and really pushing the limits
of what social media can do for their respective shows. Ratings all across the broadcast spectrum
have been trending downwards but Kimmel has shown surprising growth ever since
he was promoted to his earlier time slot. If anything, Kimmel is demonstrating night after night that in order to succeed in late night today, you have to go viral.
