Opinion: Late-night hosts jumping back in after 5 months, while their shows face huge challenges

Editor’s Note: Bill Carter covered the media business for more than 25 years at The New York Times. He has also been a contributor to CNN, and the author of four books about television, including “The Late Shift.” He was the Emmy-nominated writer of the HBO film adaptation of that book. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

“Well, let’s see what’s in the news …”

It’s been five months — five months — since the hosts of late-night television shows have had the opportunity to deliver the traditional stand-up monologues that have been, for almost 70 years, the comic commentary on the daily events of American life.

They ought to be ready to find something to joke about.

The four broadcast network versions of the classic late-night show return Monday night following the end of the writers’ strike. That means two Jimmys, a Seth and a Stephen — Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers and Colbert — will be back on stage and in front of the cameras.

Plenty of opportunity still awaits, but also a lot of questions, beginning with: No matter how funny it all is, will people care? The recent story of late-night television has been dominated by diminishment. The major late-night franchises, which also include “The Daily Show” on Comedy Central, and, perhaps the most durable of all, “Saturday Night Live,” have seen a plummet in advertising revenue, from about $700 million in 2018 to just over $400 million in 2022.

Of course that decline was driven by steep fall-offs in viewership. Ashwin Navin, chief executive of research group Samba TV, was quoted in The New York Times saying the major late-night shows have suffered audience losses of as much as 50%.

The reason is that linear television as a business — and a way of life — has been sliding toward irrelevance. Viewing habits, especially those of younger Americans, have gravitated toward other video sources, headed by streaming services and the internet.

The counter argument on behalf of late night is that it remains an almost unduplicatable form of original, pure television. Variants of the form — usually lacking the element of topicality — have been tried on streaming with little to no success.

Late night is a form of entertainment in which immediacy is built in. It shares that with sports and news, two of the last remaining rationales for “linear television.” It is a perishable commodity best consumed fresh, which is why missing all those tantalizing comedy premises over the past five months has been so frustrating.

So what are the odds the late-night hosts will have something to say about everything they’ve missed?

Indeed, the basic rhythm of life for late-night writers, which include the hosts themselves, has been built around surveying the news of the day, finding the big items that scream out for mockery, adding a sprinkling of weird items from the fringes of the news — animal stories, bizarre records, celebrity embarrassments — and generating between 10 and 20 jokes in the same elemental form: set-up, pause, punchline.

Before a five-month-long strike, the worst thing that could happen to late-night writers was a string of uneventful news days.

That’s no longer a worry. If anything, the writers and hosts have probably been exasperated at the firehose of potential material they missed out on exploiting — and if you caught the first late-night show back, “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” you got just a few glimpes of the comic riches available during the past five months:

England crowned Charles the king, remember that? No chance for late night to mock the pomposity and purple-robed excess.

New York Rep. George Santos, already a late-night favorite for his serial fabulisms, pleaded not guilty to 13 federal charges, from alleged misuse of campaign funds to lying about his own finances. Golden opportunity missed.

Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert was caught on tape at a performance of the musical “Beetlejuice” doing a version of the hand jive with a date (a special favorite of OIiver on Sunday night). The possibilities there would have been endless.

Hunter Biden had a plea deal, then he didn’t, then he was indicted on three charges, all the while being mentioned more times on Fox News than commercials for psoriasis remedies.

A guy (Yevgeny Prigozhin) leading a private mercenary group named for a German opera composer (Richard Wagner, the idol of Russia’s existential enemy, Adolf Hitler), decided to start an insurrection against Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, even though he used to be Putin’s chef (or caterer at least). He got to the point of taking over Russian military facilities, only to back off on marching to Moscow, which led to his supposed exile in Belarus. He later ended up on an unfortunate ride on a private jet that crashed.

Two movies, one about a plastic doll (“Barbie”), the other about nuclear destruction (“Oppenheimer”), electrified the moribund film industry by opening the same week and blowing up the box office. “Barbie” became the first movie directed by a woman (Greta Gerwig) to surpass $1 billion in sales. A massive cultural phenomenon, “Barbenheimer” went unobserved by late night.

A former president of the United States was indicted three times, once for obstructing justice in refusing to return classified documents, once for conspiracy to steal the election in the state of Georgia, and once for trying to overthrow the entire American democratic system of government, all between June and August. Late-night writers, who have composed probably more jokes about Donald Trump than any other figure in history, were mute on every juicy legal development.

And Taylor Swift was going to football games featuring her rumored new boyfriend, Travis Kelce.

At least the shows will get a crack at the last one, presuming the romance survives a Jets game.

Of course, throwing a five-month separation into an already troubled romance is generally not a way to sustain a long-term commitment.

But at least the main hosts remain fully engaged. They proved that with their collaboration on a strike-inspired podcast called “Strike Force Five,” which reminded anyone who listened in why Kimmel, Fallon, Colbert and Meyers (joined by Oliver) are pleasant — and very funny — company to spend an hour with.

They’re all back. Enjoy them while you can.

For more CNN news and newsletters create an account at CNN.com