Late Night Television in The United States - Other Formats

Other Formats

The "midnight movie" format is another popular late-night format, found particularly among local stations. Buffalo, New York's Off Beat Cinema, Cleveland, Ohio's now-discontinued Big Chuck and Lil' John, Chicago's Svengoolie, and Elvira's Movie Macabre are some of the better-known late night hosted movie series.

There are also some daytime talk shows that air in late night, such as The Jerry Springer Show (because of the program's adult content). Most of the time however, daytime talk shows air in late night involuntarily because of low ratings in their original daytime slots, no room on their station's schedule in an appropriate timeslot, or to fill time otherwise taken up by infomercials or sitcom reruns. Incidentally, the first talk show to follow the format known today as the "daytime talk show" indeed aired in late night; Les Crane's pioneering interview show aired on ABC in late night for six months in 1964 and 1965.

A brief influx of game shows began to fill the late night airwaves in the mid-1980s, such as Tom Kennedy's nighttime Price Is Right, The $1,000,000 Chance of a Lifetime, and High Rollers; these were shows that were targeted for prime time access slots but found that Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! had already cornered the market for that time slot. Virtually all of those game shows were cancelled after one year on the air. During the 1990s and early 2000s, the dating game show also filled late night slots in syndication, Love Connection and Studs were some of the earliest successes in the 1990s; though the dating game shows that debuted after 1998, such as Blind Date, The 5th Wheel and Elimidate, were often known for pushing the boundaries of sexually-suggestive content on broadcast television; the genre largely died off from syndication by 2006. The dating game show format saw a resurgence in 2011, with the debut of Excused and Who Wants to Date a Comedian? into syndication.

Still other late night programs break the standard format; most notably, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is a parody of an evening news program, while The Colbert Report parodies political talk shows. Fox News Channel's Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld uses a roundtable format which has a mix of news discussion mixed with comedy, although roundtable is only used in the descriptive sense; some guests appear on the program via satellite, while a regular on the show appears from another part of the Fox News studios.

ABC's Nightline has long been an exception to the networks' "comedy/variety" formula. Debuting in 1980, Nightline is a nightly half-hour newsmagazine that airs immediately after ABC affiliates' local newscasts. It has finished at or near a tie for second-place (along with Letterman's show) in the late-night Nielsen ratings in recent years.