Talk isn’t cheap. That was evident not only late at night, when “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” ended its run, but also during the day, when the first-run syndicated talk show hosted by Kelly Clarkson and Sherri Shepherd announced last week that it would end by the end of the year.
Clarkson said she was ending her seven-year run with NBC Universal for personal reasons, and Debmar Mercury’s “Shelly” cited difficult market conditions. “This decision was driven by the evolution of the daytime television landscape,” Debmar-Mercury co-presidents Ira Bernstein and Mort Marcus said in a statement announcing the cancellation of “Shelly” after four seasons.
Whatever the reason for Clarkson and Sheppard’s departure, there are no new daytime speakers to replace them yet. (However, there are rumors that Pink’s future guest hosting roles on Kelly are meant as a tryout.) A longtime flagship show, Live with Kelly and Mark remains the number one entertainment talk show in the daytime, and is expected to continue doing so. The industry’s remaining daytime talk shows — CBS Media Ventures’ “Drew Barrymore,” Disney’s “Tamron Hall,” Warner Bros./Telepictures’ “Jennifer Hudson,” NBCUniversal’s “Karamo” and “Steve Wilkos” — are all awaiting pickup calls, and some are more likely to return than others.
“I think it’s symptomatic that the economic situation has changed,” said Frank Chicha, Fox’s programming director. “The level of viewership these programs attracted did not justify their cost.”
It’s been 15 years since “The Oprah Winfrey Show” ended as the most successful daytime talk show of all time. Phil Donahue, Mike Douglas, and Dinah Shore hosted popular early morning daytime speakers. Later, the genre became more sleazy and tabloid-like with hosts such as Sally Jesse Raphael, Ricki Lake, Dr. Phil, Maury Povich, and Jerry Springer. Stars and comedians have also tried it, with Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres being the most popular.
“These shows were making $50 million, $100 million, even $300 million a year,” says Ed Wilson, a longtime broadcaster and syndicater who now runs a media investment fund. “There’s a real void right now.”
That profit disappeared, and studios and distributors often ended up losing money on these shows. Talent, music, producers, set, audience negotiators, these storytellers aren’t cheap to produce. “The budget just doesn’t line up with what we’re getting out of these things,” Cicha says. “At some point, you’re going to say, ‘If we did it next year, would any of the conversations we’re having now change?'” And if you think about it, if you’re paying attention to what’s going on with your linear audience, it’s probably going to get even worse. So at some point you’re like, ‘Why do I keep doing this? ” he says. ”
Syndicators are faced not only with higher budgets and smaller linear audiences, but also with cash-strapped broadcaster groups who are cutting back on the amount they are willing to pay in license fees or even requesting barter deals (where they don’t pay a license fee and give up advertising time to a national distributor), which doesn’t cover their costs. Studios that were previously active in producing entertainment talk shows as part of their own marketing efforts (so-called “benefits to the studios”) may find that it is no longer effective.
Meanwhile, the station airs a ton of local news programs in exchange for paying Cindy’s fare. It doesn’t cost more to add an extra hour or two of live local broadcasts. Local viewers still watch it anyway. Already, local news is more dominant than ever. Stations that once aired at most one daytime newscast now dominate their daytime lineup with those broadcasts. In Los Angeles, for example, Nexstar’s KTLA currently broadcasts local news from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fox’s KTTV will air the news from 4 a.m. to noon, during breaks on Cindy’s shows (“Shelly,” “Jennifer Hudson,” “Dateline,” “25 Words or Less” and “TMZ Live”), then return to the news at 5 p.m.
“The bottom line is that the network will no longer be paying more than $25 million for new daytime programming,” one person said.
Many local stations already have live local news streaming channels, so it’s easy to transfer much of that money to broadcast channels. “There are stations that are doing things with streaming that can take over right away, and now we have enough confidence that we won’t miss a beat,” Cicha says. “We’ve learned a lot about what works, and what works is live/local.”
Television station groups such as ABC, CBS, and NBC that broadcast programming in top markets also have their own programming that is prioritized. (For example, “Tamron Hall” is produced through ABC News, which allows you to write off the cost of that program.)
At the same time, viewers looking for daytime talk are increasingly turning to low-cost video podcasts on YouTube, which are also making inroads into the daytime audience.
Syndie’s distributors have been trying to address the challenges of daytime talk for some time. They were hopeful that digital like FAST channels, streamers and YouTube’s secondary window could sustain daytime talk even as license fees for broadcasters fell. But so far, that’s not the case.
Some strategies have worked. CBS Media Ventures launches “The Drew Barrymore Show” as a two-and-a-half hour run. This can be done as a one-hour block or broken up and combined with local news.
Could the future of first-air daytime talk be cheaper, podcast-like fare? Telepictures has announced it is developing a syndicated half-hour show with Jenny McCarthy that will be produced like a video podcast and marketed as a daytime talk show.
It’s unclear whether McCarthy’s project will move forward, but Chicha said it was a smart move: “It was the right idea to go with a low budget and no frills. I have to believe that if I were ever to do[a talk show]again, it would definitely be in that format.”
Wilson said the decline in daytime talk “breaks my heart. But if someone can be the Taylor Sheridan of syndication and develop some hit shows and own it, I think there’s probably a great opportunity.”
