First on LateNighter: CBS dropped a bombshell in March when it announced that not only was it cancelling After Midnight with Taylor Tomlinson, but it was abandoning the 12:37am time slot altogether.
Yes, the decision was reportedly precipitated by After Midnight’s host stepping away from the show to focus on her standup career, and yes, linear late-night TV ratings have been on a steady decades-long decline. But was CBS really saying that there was no longer a business case for late-night television at 12:37am, even when its 11:35pm show consistently dominates its network competition?
This week we got our answer. Apparently there is still money to be made by the network at that late hour, just not in the way that we’ve come to expect it.
To the casual observer, Comics Unleased with Byron Allen, which CBS announced Tuesday will be taking over the After Midnight slot, bears a passing resemblance to the show it’s replacing: both present a chorus of comics delivering jokes when called upon by a funny, appealing host.
In this case however, CBS won’t own the show; nor produce it. Instead, it’s leasing the time period out to Entertainment Studios, owner of Comics Unleashed.
This type of transaction is known in the TV business as a “time buy.” An outside media company pays the network for the right to put a show on its air, expecting to make up the cost by selling commercial time to advertisers.
The most familiar examples of time buys are the infomercials you see in wee hours on local television and cable. In this case the product being pitched in the rented network airtime is not a ShamWow or a Squatty Potty, but a late-night comedy show.
The time buy has been a strategic part of the growth of Allen Media Group, the corporate parent of Entertainment Studios, now a multi-billion business led by Byron Allen, who doubles as the host of Comics Unleashed.
Comics Unleashed has been around for nearly two decades now, although it’s only sporadically produced new episodes. Perhaps you’ve stumbled across it on your local TV station. Or maybe you saw it on CBS in late 2023 and early 2024 when the network was filling the strike-delayed gap between the end of The Late Late Show with James Corden and the start of After Midnight.
That was a time buy too.
If you’ve seen the show, and you enjoyed some of the jokes, you are in luck. Because not only is Comics Unleashed coming back, so are some of the jokes.
The same jokes.
Several people aware of the CBS deal for Comics Unleashed say the plan is to run an hour of back-to-back repeats of the original half-hour episodes that first began airing in the syndicated version of the show a decade and more ago, possibly augmented by some original episodes—and jokes.
None of that will be up to CBS though, because CBS will have nothing to do with the production of the show—if there is any production of the show. That will be up to Entertainment Studios and its resident mogul, Allen.
He certainly has the right credentials to host a late-night comedy show, having begun his career as a working stand-up. (Allen was the youngest comic ever to do a set on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.)
Since then, he’s built a somewhat low-profile but vast media empire, including ownership of The Weather Channel and even an interest in the Fox Sports Network. Allen has taken particularly shrewd advantage of the changing needs of local TV stations, offering programming for no cost to the stations.
Allen’s time-buy approach has extended to CBS before. After buying the digital network The Grio, devoted to Black news and culture, he created an annual Grio Awards show, and bought time on CBS to get it on the air (again in exchange for the right to sell commercials).
Clearly, the idea is to create a financial win-win. Allen gets a new outlet for his already produced late-night show. CBS, which had announced it had no plans to fill a 12.37am hour that had a long history of previous occupants over thirty years—Tom Snyder, Craig Kilborn, Craig Ferguson, Corden—collects some cash.
And local CBS affiliates get free programming they can use to sell some local commercials.
Viewers? They get more jokes in late night, as long as they’re not expecting a lot of topical humor.
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CBS should replace it with a test pattern. It should get the same ratings as “Comics Unleashed”.
Can’t wait to see the “new” episodes featuring Richard Lewis, Gilbert Gottfried, Louie Anderson, and David Brenner. 🙄
I was holding out hope for Bill’s suggest of a repurposed Daily Show rerun.
Allen has built a multi billion dollar empire off this very simple concept. Free content, but he gets to sell the ad time. It should be a model for hungry producers our there. As broadcast TV starts to fade, the only value they’ll have is that they’re free.
Barter is hardly a new or even rare thing in broadcasting, as is fleetingly mentioned in the story. The item’s worth a paragraph, at best.
This is not the same as a barter deal. This is CBS leasing out time for cash. Letting someone else program the time.
The lamest show in late night. In the LA market it typically runs after Taylor’s show and has forever. It’s a rush to the remote when the theme song plays.
It’s a horrible, scripted “ here’s a question” so the “comic” can do a bit. But, apparently it made Byron a multimillionaire.
I’d have entertained the idea of CBS wanting a news division produced program in the 12:30AM slot, and it be modeled after Tom Snyder’s Late Late Show and Larry King Live, and hosted by a journalist/conversationalist and the focus on mostly short-form and long-form interviews with guests, versus doing yet another comedy talk show. I still remember Snyder’s show from the late 90s which served as an alternative to the traditional late night comedy shows, and the legendary journalist would have on guests of substance for great conversations.
this sounds absolutely awful
My theory is that this is only happening because enough affiliates were unhappy about the network abandoning the time slot and pressured CBS to put *something* in the time slot.