'Jimmy Kimmel Live!' to Cut Down on Live Music
Pretty soon, the last bastion of musicality on late-night television will be The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Someone needs to go and cover The Roots in bubble wrap.Back in the golden days of broadcast TV, live music was part and parcel of the late-night medium. The NBC Orchestra heralded the coming of Johnny Carson during his reign on The Tonight Show with his signature song, “Johnny’s Theme,” and music legends like Frank Sinatra and Louis Armstrong regularly blessed the NBC Studios audience with live performances. Today, however, there is a dearth in the late-night industry of the iconic musical performances that gave the genre its variety-hour feel back during its heyday. Some shows have even done away with their house bands entirely.According to The Hollywood Reporter, ABC’s flagship late-night show Jimmy Kimmel Live! will soon be cutting down on musical performances for reasons that the network has yet to divulge, though financial motives would likely play some factor in the move.
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The slashing of musical guests from Jimmy Kimmel Live! is just the latest reduction in rhythm that the late-night community has suffered at the hands of the bean counters. The swan song for music on talk shows will likely be coming sooner rather than later – but who the heck is going to sing it? From a budget perspective, it's easy to understand why ABC would ease off their investment in musical guests on Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Having to pay out the union day rate to an entire band – and, depending on the artists' stature, some of their road crew as well – on top of the added production expenses makes music an extraordinarily resource-intensive feature of the show, especially when plopping some movie star on the couch to recite their publicist-approved anecdotes has the potential to draw in just as many eyeballs.From a creative angle, however, this is yet another artistic concession that the late-night medium has had to make, presumably for the benefit of the bottom line, that brings it further away from the spirit of the classic shows to which today's late-night programs owe their existence. After all, every late-night series is, obviously, a show, and treating the audience to a couple songs here and there drastically improved the entertainment level of late-night during the most lucrative years of its existence.However, not all viewers have such nostalgia for the late-night musical act – in a Reddit thread about the Jimmy Kimmel Live! move, the top commenter wrote, “Even 30 years ago, when the late night show was king, i'd still change the channel when the musical guest came on (unless it was someone I really cared about).”“Good. Late night shows need to evolve," another concurred, They are following a format that was made in the 70’s. Things have changed a lot since then.”That user has a point – late-night as we knew it is dying, and the limits on its ability to modernize may lead to the end of all shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!. But if these shows don't replace the staples of the traditional late-night series that cost-cutting has stripped away with something equally worthwhile, then there won't be anything left to save in late-night.
