As ‘Kelly Clarkson’ and ‘Sherri’ End Their Runs, Stations Give Up Expensive Daytime Talk Shows for More Live, Local News

A new report highlights production costs, along with video podcasts, as a few reasons why daytime talk shows are starting to suffer. This comes a week after news broke that both Sherri and The Kelly Clarkson Show will be signing off later on this year. In addition, with the ratings dropping in cable and big-ticket guest stars having their own platforms to talk on YouTube and Netflix are causing viewership to dip.

via: Variety

Talk isn’t cheap. That’s become apparent in late night — where “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” is about to end its run — but also in daytime, where last week the first-run syndicated talk shows hosted by Kelly Clarkson and Sherri Shepherd announced that they would wrap by the end of the year.

Clarkson said she was ending her NBCUniversal-distributed show after seven years for personal reasons, while “Sherri,” from Debmar-Mercury, cited the tough marketplace. “This decision is driven by the evolving daytime television landscape,” Debmar-Mercury co-presidents Ira Bernstein and Mort Marcus said in a statement announcing the cancellation of “Sherri” after four seasons.

Whatever the reason for Clarkson’s and Shepherd’s exits, no new daytime talkers are yet in the wings to replace them. (Although there is some talk that Pink’s upcoming guest hosting stint on “Kelly” is meant to be a tryout.) Longtime mainstay “Live With Kelly and Mark” remains the No. 1 daytime entertainment talk show and is expected to continue; the industry’s remaining daytime talk strips — CBS Media Ventures’ “Drew Barrymore,” Disney’s “Tamron Hall,” Warner Bros./Telepictures’ “Jennifer Hudson” and NBCUniversal’s “Karamo” and “Steve Wilkos”— are all awaiting word of a pickup, with some more likely to return than others.

“I think it’s symptomatic that the economics have changed,” says Frank Cicha, the head of programming for Fox TV Stations. “The levels of audiences that these shows were garnering just couldn’t justify the cost.”

It’s been 15 years since “The Oprah Winfrey Show” ended its run as the most successful daytime talk show of all time. Phil Donahue, Mike Douglas and Dinah Shore hosted early, popular daytime talkers; later the genre got more salacious and tabloidy with hosts such as Sally Jessy Raphael, Ricki Lake, Dr. Phil, Maury Povich and Jerry Springer. Stars and comedians have also tried their hand, with Rosie O’Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres among the most popular.

“These were shows that were making $50 million, $100 million and in some cases $300 million a year in profit,” says Ed Wilson, who worked in broadcast and syndication for years and now runs a media investment fund. “Now, there’s a real void.”

That profit is gone, and in many cases studios and distributors are now losing money on these shows. Talent, music, producers, sets, audience wranglers — these talkers aren’t cheap to produce. “The budgets just don’t add up with what you’re making on these things,” Cicha says. “At a point you get to ‘Is the conversation that we’re having now going to be any different if we have it next year?’ And when you think about it, it’s probably going to be worse, if you’re paying any attention to what is happening to linear audiences. So at a certain point, you just say, ‘Why continue to do this?’”

Beyond higher budgets and smaller linear audiences, syndicators are also facing cash-strapped station groups that are cutting what they’re willing to front in license fees or even demanding barter deals (in which they don’t pay license fees, but give up ad time to the national distributors) — but that won’t cover costs. Studios that used to be willing to produce entertainment talk shows as part of their company’s marketing efforts (the so-called “benefit to studio”) may find it’s just not effective anymore.

Meanwhile, instead of paying for syndie fare, stations are bulking up on local newscasts. It doesn’t cost anything more to add another hour or two of live local broadcasts — and that’s what local audiences are still watching anyway. Already, local news dominates like never before: Stations that once aired maybe one midday newscast at most now dominate their daytime lineups with those broadcasts. In Los Angeles, for example, Nexstar’s KTLA now airs local news from 4 a.m. to 8 p.m. Fox’s KTTV runs news from 4 a.m. to noon, when it breaks for syndie fare (“Sherri,” “Jennifer Hudson,” “Dateline,” “25 Words or Less” and “TMZ Live”), then returns for news at 5.

Says an insider: “The bottom line is, broadcast will no longer pay $25 million-plus for any new daytime shows.”

Many local stations have already been programming live local news streaming channels — so it’s easy to move more of that fare to the broadcast channel. “We’ve got stations that are doing things on streaming that we can pull over immediately, and we’re confident enough now that we wouldn’t miss a beat,” Cicha says. “We’ve learned so much about what works, and it’s live/local that works.”

Also, TV station groups — including ABC, CBS and NBC, which program in the top markets — have their own shows that take priority. (“Tamron Hall,” for example, is produced through ABC News, which can amortize costs from that show.)

At the same time, audiences looking for talk in the daytime are increasingly watching cheap-to-produce video podcasts on YouTube, which is also eating into the daypart’s audience.

Syndie distributors have been attempting to address daytime talk challenges for some time. They were hoping that digital — like secondary windows on FAST channels, streamers or YouTube — might help keep daytime talk afloat even as broadcast station license fees decline. But so far, that hasn’t been the case.

Some strategies have fared better. CBS Media Ventures has started distributing “The Drew Barrymore Show” as two half hours, which can be run as an hour block or split and paired with local news.

Could the future of first-run daytime talk be in cheaper, podcast-like fare? Telepictures announced it was developing a syndicated half hour with Jenny McCarthy that would be produced like a video podcast but marketed as a daytime talk show.

It’s unclear whether the McCarthy project will move forward, but Cicha says it was a smart direction: “Thinking about the lower budget, no frills, was the right idea. And if we ever see another [talk show], that certainly will be the format, I’d have to believe.”

Wilson says the decline of daytime talk “breaks my heart. But I think there’s probably a big opportunity if someone could be the Taylor Sheridan of syndication and develop a couple of hit shows — and then own it.”