Every broadcast network has its signature stars—performers so closely identified with the network that their milestones become network events. The classic example was Johnny Carson, whose Tonight Show anniversaries were regularly celebrated by NBC with prime-time specials.
Tonight Byron Allen is getting his own two-hour prime-time anniversary special on CBS. So does that make him CBS’s signature star?
Allen, of course, is the host—as well as producer, showrunner, and owner—of Comics Unleashed, the long-running syndicated comedian roundtable show that succeeded The Late Show with Stephen Colbert at 11:35 p.m. weeknights on CBS last May.
Just four months into that role, Allen is getting a rather significant celebratory platform: tonight’s 9:00 p.m. special marks the 20th anniversary of his comedy franchise.
Note: this will not mark 20 years for Allen and his show on CBS. It will mark 20 years since he launched Comics Unleashed as a syndicated entry playing at various times—not always in late night—on a roundup of stations around the country.
Nor has the show been in continuous production those 20 years.
But getting a massive serving of prime time on a network on a Tuesday night—not in midsummer, but in late September, the traditional launch period for a network’s new prime-time entries—has to be considered rather remarkable.
Stephen Colbert didn’t get a special in his first year at 11:35; nor did David Letterman, who arrived at CBS with just a bit more fanfare than Allen did.
CBS didn’t even mark Colbert’s 10th anniversary as host of The Late Show last September, probably because it had recently decided to ax his now two-time Emmy-winning show.
Notably, Allen’s two 11:35 p.m. time slot competitors were honored with anniversary specials in prime time in recent years: Jimmy Kimmel at ABC (his 20th) and Jimmy Fallon at NBC (his 10th).
And in each of those cases, the specials went a long way to cementing those two late-night hosts’ positions as signature stars for their networks.
So: heady company for Byron Allen.
But as is true of his entry as a full-fledged network late-night host last year, Allen’s prime-time honor comes with special circumstances. Both are the result of his company writing a check to buy the airtime from CBS.
According to an executive aware of the terms of Allen’s deal with CBS, the prime-time special is not something CBS’s entertainment division decided to program. It was negotiated as part of the overall time-buy deal Allen struck with CBS for its two late-night hours. (The later hour is now filled with the comedy game show, Funny You Should Ask, another long-running syndicated show Allen created in 2017—which may mean a 10th anniversary special for that one is in the cards next fall.)
Tonight’s Unleashed special will be a compendium of joke-filled appearances from high-profile comics including Kevin Hart, Sebastian Maniscalco, Nate Bargatze, Tiffany Haddish, and Whitney Cummings. Johnny Carson will also appear—in clip form—with the special set to include a biographical look at Allen’s life and career leading up to Comics Unleashed.
The series as it airs on CBS in late night remains a half-hour show. It now airs original half-hour episodes at 11:35, backed in the second half-hour by previously aired editions.
The inclusion of the big special in Allen’s overall time-buy deal with CBS would seem to amount to quite an additional benefit. If the jury is still out on his status as a signature star, this deal alone would seem to put him in rarefied company as a TV businessman.
The number on his check to CBS for the Colbert time slot has been reported as $15 million, with another $5 million for the later hour.
CBS has claimed losses of up to $40 million a year on the Colbert hour (disputed by some late-night insiders, including Jimmy Kimmel), which made the network’s apparently modest take of $15 million seem like the best it might do.
But Allen, who has been building relationships with sponsors and brands for two decades, has almost surely profited well from his arrangement with CBS. Even at extremely modest ad rates, the sheer volume of available commercials for five hours a week over 52 weeks would seem sure to generate profits for him well above $15 million, even including whatever the show’s production costs are.
Those seem well controlled. For one thing, all four new installments of the first half-hour of original content are shot in one studio sitting, one day a week—a vast savings over shows that shoot four days a week.
And so far, Comics Unleashed has performed in a respectable-enough ratings range to be attractive to some advertisers, even if its numbers aren’t fully competitive with ABC and NBC.
In the most recent Live+3 weekly ratings report—for the week of September 14—Kimmel showed his increasing dominance, attracting 2.581 million viewers and 311,000 in the key 18-49 demo.
On NBC, Jimmy Fallon had 1.35 million and 164,000 in the two main ratings measures.
Unleashed averaged 604,000 total viewers and 65,000 adults 18-49. In this case, those figures were for a full hour of repeats (that is, the first half hour was a repeat of a recent edition; the second half hour was a repeat from the show’s deep library).
But in some instances—especially as measured by Nielsen Live+Same Day ratings—Comics Unleashed is more competitive. On Friday of that same week, a 20-year-old second half hour of Unleashed beat the back half of a ten-day-old Fallon repeat among viewers aged 18-49.
In general, Allen does fare better on Fridays, which may signal that viewers understand the other shows are almost always in repeats on Fridays with recent shows fans may have seen, while Allen has a show that is unlikely to be familiar.
Of course, a better explanation for Allen is his central argument: that his completely non-topical, non-political, non-controversial approach to comedy doesn’t rock anyone’s boat and doesn’t have the ephemeral shelf life of comedy about what’s going on currently.
Episodes of Comics Unleashed on CBS have sometimes included comics who are long deceased, like David Brenner and John Witherspoon.
At least one comic who was on many years ago has made fun of the time gap.
Roy Wood Jr., who now hosts CNN’s Have I Got News for You, is listed among the comics who will be featured in the anniversary special tonight. Tweeting a decades-old screenshot of himself on a repeat when the show first started airing on CBS, he commented—jokingly, apparently:
“My issue with ‘Comics Unleashed’ returning to TV is that no one is letting people know that all of these episodes are AT LEAST 15 years old. Folks gone think we dressing like this now .”
That won’t matter tonight; anniversary shows tend to be clip shows.
How the special performs for two hours in prime time will be an interesting test of how big a star Byron Allen, the host and comic, is for CBS.
But based on what we know of the terms of his overall deal with CBS, the special is likely already some tasty gravy for Byron Allen, businessman.
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