This is going to take a while.
Picking up on last week's thread, pretty much everything you've read about CBS replacing Colbert with Byron Allen's Comics Unleashed is wrong. Even by the abysmal standards of television journalism, the reporting here has been god-awful. We can say with a high degree of confidence that there is less here than meets the eye, but since none of the people who are paid good money to dig into these stories bothered to do any work, we are left to speculate about most of the finer details.
The meta-story of the demise of CBS late night is just the latest fodder in our long-standing rant about coverage of the television industry, a corner of the news landscape where huge stories go unreported, demonstrably wrong conventional wisdom is allowed to stand for decades, and the most egregiously distorted corporate spin is credulously reported as fact.
In this case, what has been described as a major change to the CBS lineup appears to have been nothing more than a standard and fairly trivial change to the existing syndication agreement between Allen and the network, applying primarily to, as far as I can tell, 15 of the more than 250 CBS stations in the country.
The key distinction at this point is the concept of an owned-and-operated station.
Normally, when we talk about the CBS network, we include all of the CBS affiliate stations regardless of who owns them. The same applies to ABC, NBC, Fox, and The CW. The relationship between these stations and their parent network can get a little complicated, and they do have a certain degree of freedom about what network programming they choose to air, though, to be honest, you'd need to talk to an expert to get the exact details.
As a general rule, however, the affiliate stations run the programming that is fed to them from the networks in the time slots matching the national schedule. I'm not sure what kind of legal requirements there are behind this, but the main reason is that network feed, even from a bottom-tier company like The CW, is still going to bring in better numbers than you could get with syndicated programming. Which brings us to the next key concept.
These stations have a great deal of freedom as to how they fill those hours not provided by the network. They can, of course, produce their own content, such as local news, but it is generally far cheaper and more profitable to go with something syndicated, be it reruns of The Big Bang Theory and NCIS or some daytime talk show or a game show not produced by CBS, NBC, etc.
The cost of these shows varies with their popularity, with the bottom of the barrel being sold on what is called a barter basis. The programming is provided to the stations for free with the understanding that the ad revenue from that show will be split between the station and the syndicator. In some cases, the syndicator will even pay a fee to the stations, making it something of a hybrid between traditional barter and the infomercial model.
Circa 1990, Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update did a bit on the debut of a cable channel with programming that consisted entirely of unscored, unnarrated footage of tropical fish swimming in a large aquarium. The anchor said that the channel carried fish programming 24 hours a day, seven days a week, except for 4:00 a.m. on Sunday morning when it aired the Byron Allen show.
Most barter agreements required stations to air a program a certain number of times during the week but did not specify what time of day they had to run it. As a result, if you see what appears to be a first-run syndication program airing after 2:00 in the morning, chances are that the show's numbers were so bad that the station was simply burning off its obligation in a time slot that virtually no one was watching.
Byron Allen, a truly gifted businessman, has become a billionaire largely because of his understanding of the television industry in general and the barter model in particular. Probably the best example of this is Comics Unleashed, an almost unwatchable show but a brilliant business model. The standard talk-show formula for interviewing stand-up comics has the host make small talk with the guest for a few minutes, then feed them a prearranged prompt so that they can go into their act. Comics Unleashed maintains only the slightest pretense of an actual conversation. Most of the segments consist of Allen turning to the guest and saying something like, "I hear you've been spending lots of time on the road recently," at which point the comic does a three-to-five-minute excerpt of their routine. As Norm MacDonald said about the show, the comics couldn't be more leashed.
The shows are obviously done as quickly and cheaply as possible, with lineups consisting mainly of C-list comics, with a few B-listers and the occasional former star like Jimmy Walker or David Brenner. The real genius, however, lies in how Allen has made the show almost perfectly evergreen. Comics are instructed to avoid politics and anything else remotely topical. The episodes are absolutely interchangeable. Having debuted in 2006, more than 350 are currently in the can, and for those watching at home it is often impossible to tell whether the one they are seeing is 10 weeks old or 10 years old.
In a sense, the frequent lack of recognizable stars might even be considered a feature, not a bug. With a lineup of comics you've never heard of, it is even more difficult to distinguish the old from the new, unless, like the previously mentioned Brenner, one of the comics has passed away. (Comics Unleashed's companion show, Funny You Should Ask, breaks with the pattern by including A-listers like Louie Anderson and Billy Gardell but otherwise follows the same cheap and interchangeable template.)
Commentators focused on that 85% drop-off from Colbert's finale are missing the bigger and bleaker picture. That debut number was based on a tremendous amount of publicity for a show that, despite a 20-year run, most people have never seen. More importantly, it appears that, due to that publicity and the suddenness of the Comics Unleashed announcement, virtually all CBS affiliates chose to carry the program in the 11:35 slot. While Byron Allen may have some sort of condition in his contract with CBS requiring those 15 owned-and-operated stations to leave him in Colbert's spot for a while, this almost certainly does not apply to the over 200 other CBS affiliates, which will very probably find something more profitable to air in that hour and will send Comics Unleashed back to its natural habitat.
Comics Unleashed has always done terrible numbers and it will return to terrible numbers in the future, but that's what it was designed for. Allen has designed a show that can turn a healthy profit with audiences in the tens of thousands. Both he and the show will be fine.
The local news shows of CBS affiliates (the source of about half their stations' ad revenue) will be screwed, but that's a topic for another post.
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