Lorne Michaels deservingly owns late night on NBC. Since the 1970's, he has built an audience of millions of fans in multiple generations to tune in. Now with the Carson era ending with the departure of Leno, Late Night is changing and the goal of Lorne Michaels is to kill it! From the very beginning with Steve Allen and Jack Paar, the audience was made up of 40-80 year-olds who would drink coffee at night, eat cheese dip and fall asleep on the "lazy boy" with their curlers in their hair. As goes the demographic of late night, so goes the overall TV audience. The Baby Boomers grew up with Carson and inherited Leno and Letterman. That demographic is now in their 60's and are fading away. Many are starting to watch something else. The new audience that make up the large majority of Late Night TV will be the SNL crowd. Youngsters who are staying up late and anyone younger than Jimmy Fallon. The older generation has been shown the door for the most logical reason, TV is changing. The days of only having 3 channels on the television set have been forgotten. With hundreds of cable stations, pay per view, and the internet, the television audience has shrunk. The majority of fans that watch a certain show are no longer watching it live, but are watching it online the next day. Therefore, the audience of the future and the rating systems is going to change. If something great happened on Late Night on Tuesday, I'll watch it online Wednesday morning while on the way to work. With that said, the Jimmy Fallon Tonight Show can't be compared to any previous host of the Tonight Show. Much like Leno replacing Carson, it was a completely different show. For TV's new audience, you have 6 full nights of Saturday Night Live. And for the audience of old, you still of Letterman for a few more years.
