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Seth Meyers to Succeed Fallon on ‘Late Night’

May 12, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Mr. Meyers, the longtime head writer on “Saturday Night Live” and host of its “Weekend Update” segment, will succeed Jimmy Fallon, who is moving up one hour to take over NBC’s “Tonight Show.”

NBC made the appointment, which had been widely expected, one day before Mr. Meyers was to be introduced to advertisers at NBC’s presentation of its new programming lineup at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan.

The assignment will keep Mr. Meyers under the production leadership of Lorne Michaels, who will continue to serve as executive producer of “Late Night” as well as serving in the same position on Mr. Fallon’s “Tonight Show” as it moves to New York. (And of course, he will remain in charge of “SNL.”)

In an interview before taking the stage on Saturday’s edition of “SNL,” Mr. Meyers said, “Working at ‘SNL’ requires 100 percent of your mental capacity — on easy weeks. And so I had not really spent a lot of time thinking about what I was going to do next. Obviously I can’t quit Lorne. So this seems like a pretty good deal that I have an opportunity to keep working with him.”

Both hosts are expected to start their new shows around the time of NBC’s coverage of the Winter Olympics from Russia next February. Mr. Meyers will stay on “SNL” through the fall season before he starts his preparation — most likely in January — to take over on “Late Night.”

Mr. Michaels said, “The thing that’s staggering to me is that since 1982 there have been only three hosts, and Seth will be the fourth. And when you look at the company, it’s all pretty good company.”

Mr. Meyers will be the next in a line that includes David Letterman, Conan O’Brien and Mr. Fallon.

“I am aware of the history,” Mr. Meyers said. “Each chapter of my life has sort of been spent enjoying each of the guys who had the job. Letterman was sort of my first introduction to late-night television. And Conan was all through college and postcollege years. Jimmy, obviously, I think, does it as well as anyone could ever do it.”

Mr. Michaels said there was “complete agreement” at NBC on the choice of Mr. Meyers. “The only name that kept coming up was Seth.” He said of Mr. Meyers, “I think he radiates intelligence. He has a background as a performer and a writer. And because I think he doesn’t like to copy anyone, I think he will find a way to make the show different and distinct and not a mirror of “The Tonight Show.”

No decisions have been made yet about whether the format of the show will change in any substantial way, Mr. Meyers said – not even whether there will be a house band.

“I don’t want to make any broad pronouncements about how the show is going to be, whether it’s going to be the same or different,” Mr. Meyers said. “But I have to draw on my background in improvisational comedy and sketch comedy and stand-up comedy and try to find some mix of that.”

One move Mr. Michaels is making to smooth the transition is keeping Mike Shoemaker as the day-to-day producer of “Late Night” as he has been under Mr. Fallon. “He and Seth are friends,” Mr. Michaels said. “He comes from ‘SNL.’ We will make sure that the show has all the people on it who are the best people we can put on the field.”

The connections to “Saturday Night Live” on NBC’s late-night lineup will never have been more pervasive. Mr. Fallon was a performer on the show and anchored the “Weekend Update” segment, like Mr. Meyers.

The “Late Night” show will remain in New York even with “Tonight” moving back to the city. With “SNL,” all three shows will be housed in studios in NBC’s headquarters at 30 Rockefeller Plaza. That will keep them all close to Mr. Michaels, who will now be in charge of all of NBC’s important late-night franchises.

“It’s all in the same building,” he said. “ ‘Saturday Night Live’ will be more than the majority of my time, as it always has been. Both other shows will be run by people who know what they’re doing, and who I obviously believe in; and we all have a shorthand.”

Mr. Meyers said one thing he would like to bring with him from his “Update” segments is what he called “a two-shot with talented, funny people.” These are his interviews with comedy guests who stop by the anchor desk. “A company of writer-performer hybrids who can come on and do stuff on the show,” was how he described the idea. “We’re in the very early stages of thinking about all this, but that’s very interesting to me.”

Though his selection had seemed all but inevitable, given his skills and his association with Mr. Michaels, Mr. Meyers said he found the idea of separating from “SNL” a bit difficult to embrace.

“It always seemed like a logical next move,” Mr. Meyers said. “It was just competing with the very emotional idea of leaving a place I have been for a very long time. But if you are going to do that, it seems like you might as well just move a hallway or two.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/13/business/media/seth-meyers-to-succeed-fallon-on-late-night.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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TBS Extends Conan O’Brien’s Contract Into 2015

April 2, 2013 by Leave a Comment

One place where late-night programming is facing no tension or instability is the cable channel TBS, which announced Monday that it had extended the contract of its signature star, Conan O’Brien, until November 2015.

The news comes, perhaps fittingly, as Mr. O’Brien is set to produce a week of shows from Atlanta, which is the home base of TBS.

While his old network, NBC, is in the midst of the latest late-night upheaval, trying to smooth a transition from Jay Leno to Jimmy Fallon at “The Tonight Show,” TBS is promoting Mr. O’Brien’s success with young viewers. The network notes that his audience has the youngest median age in late-night television, 39.7 for this television season. By contrast, Mr. Leno’s is 58.1 and Mr. Fallon’s is 53.3.

TBS also emphasized Mr. O’Brien’s reach on the Internet, claiming that his show leads late-night entertainment in online activity and engagement, with 8.3 million followers on Twitter and two million on Facebook.

Over all, Mr. O’Brien’s show attracts a little more than 900,000 viewers and averages just under 600,000 viewers in the 18-to-49-year-old category, which defines much of the success in late night.

TBS said that Mr. O’Brien’s real strength lay in the lower segment of that age group, those between 18 and 34, where he has more viewers than Mr. Fallon. (In fairness, his show also starts 90 minutes earlier than Mr. Fallon’s.)

Because TBS has yet to have a real star in prime time — virtually all its success is based on reruns of sitcoms like “The Big Bang Theory” — Mr. O’Brien has become the standout individual face of the network. So it is all the more important for TBS to lock Mr. O’Brien in for another two-plus years.

That also means he would not be on the market when other late-night changes might take place at any other network (CBS for example), though whether Mr. O’Brien would ever seek to return to the more cutthroat world of late-night network television is certainly open to question.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/02/business/media/tbs-extends-conan-obriens-contract-into-2015.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: The Breakfast Meeting: Fallon to Become Host of ‘Tonight’ and Ads Aim to Close Digital Divide

March 21, 2013 by Leave a Comment

NBC has made a commitment to make Jimmy Fallon, the 38-year-old host of its “Late Night” show, the host of the “Tonight” show and to move the show from Burbank, Calif., back to New York, Bill Carter reports. Mr. Fallon would succeed Jay Leno, who will turn 63 next month and whose show still regularly leads the late-night ratings. The change would by fall 2014 at the latest. NBC has been desperate to avoid acrimony that often surrounds one of the biggest changes in late-night television; their attempt to replace Mr. Leno with Conan O’Brien three years ago ended with recriminations and a reversal, as Mr. Leno was reinstated and NBC endured weeks of negative coverage.

The Advertising Council and Connect2Compete, a nonprofit group dedicated to eliminating digital illiteracy in the United States, are introducing a public service campaign to help those on the wrong side of the digital divide find free classes to learn relevant new skills, Jane L. Levere writes. The campaign will reach out to what the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, said were the approximately 100 million people, mostly low-income families and minorities, who still do not have broadband in their homes. Ads will appear on television, radio and outdoors, and will feature a toll-free telephone number and texting service that provides information about free classes nearby after callers send their ZIP codes.

The new Big East college athletic conference chose an appropriate location for the its first party, given that its seed money is coming from Fox Sports 1: the Manhattan headquarters of News Corporation. On Wednesday, in the Fox News studio where “The Five” is produced, leaders from the seven Catholic universities that left the Big East gathered for a news conference with officials from Butler, Creighton and Xavier, their newly added conference mates, Richard Sandomir reports. The Big East presidents took a big risk two years ago when they rejected an ESPN contract for $140 million a year. Starting this season, the 10 colleges will share in a 12-year, $500 million contract with Fox Sports 1, a sum that will rise to $600 million if, as expected, the league expands to 12 members.

Critics of the government of the rightist Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, are decrying what they call bald attempts by his party to control the news media, judiciary, central bank and education, Dan Bilefsky reports. A long clash between Klubradio, a radio station that is often critical of Mr. Orban’s government, and Hungary’s news media council, which hands out frequencies to radio stations and is stocked with Orban supporters, is a primary example of the conflict; the station’s license was renewed last week after years of contention. Mr. Orban’s restrictive news media law has come under fire from the European Commission, news media watchdog groups and the Council of Europe. Government officials assert that since nearly 75 percent of Hungarian media is foreign-owned the idea of government control is ludicrous.

The computer networks of three major South Korean banks and the country’s two largest broadcasters were frozen Wednesday in cyberattacks that some experts suspect came from North Korea, Choe Sang-hun writes. The attacks, which left South Korean news crews staring at blank computer monitors and many people unable to withdraw money from ATMs, originated from an Internet provider with a Chinese address but the responsible party was still unknown, the Korea Communications Commission said. Many analysts speculate that North Korean hackers hone their skills in China, but their is little evidence to back them up.

Facebook’s Graph Search is a new tool that lets users search via phrase rather than keyword, and can turn up some interesting results if used correctly. Paul Boutin writes about how to make the most of the new tool.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/the-breakfast-meeting-fallon-to-become-host-of-tonight-and-ads-aim-to-close-digital-divide/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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