Why Are Some Comedy Central Talk Shows Nightly and Others Weekly? Comedy Central President Kent Alterman Explains

A few moments after HBO’s Last Week Tonight With John Oliver won the Emmy for outstanding variety talk series, Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert bantered in an impromptu bit in which they each drank a specialty cocktail that Colbert said was called The Last Week Tonight. “It’s so high quality,” Colbert said. “Apparently, they can only make one a week.”

They have a point, but the bit belies bigger differences between nightly and weekly shows than the number of episodes they air each week.

While Last Week Tonight spends an entire week making a half-hour talk show, Kimmel’s Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC and Colbert’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on CBS both grind out hour-long shows five nights a week. Weekly shows may have the luxury of time to do extensive research, build elaborate sets and produce scripted shorts with big-name talent, but nightly shows have a more immediate platform to comment on the day’s news and — to put it bluntly — deliver more TV to watch.

Comedy Central’s four flagship talk shows fall along an even divide:

• Two (The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and just-launched The Opposition with Jordan Klepper) air back-to-back four nights a week, react immediately to the day’s Trump outburst and/or scandal, have a large group of correspondents for field pieces and studio bits, and have a topical guest near the end of the half-hour.
• The other two (The President Show and The Jim Jefferies Show) each air one night a week, have the entire next week to reinforce a focused messages on demand and on social media, are more prone to roam outside the studio or shift the tenor of the show from episode to episode, and have much more latitude with whether and how to book guests.

As Comedy Central president Kent Alterman described in a short sit-down with Decider, there’s a lot more that differentiates the network’s nightly and weekly late-night shows than the frequency of the episodes.

DECIDER: Would most shows that air one night a week be more successful if they aired four or five nights a week?

KENT ALTERMAN: No, I really don’t think so. Nightly shows and weekly shows are two different animals. The beast you have to feed to do a show four or five nights a week makes for a much different kind of show than if you’re doing it once a week.

My theory is that once a week gives you an opportunity to amplify one message at a time without stepping all over it with the next episode.

I think that’s possible. On the one hand, it gives a show the opportunity to provide a clear, simple message once a week that doesn’t get obliterated by the other nights. On the other hand, having a show on a nightly basis affords you the ability to be more reactive in real time to what’s going on in the world, which is a luxury that a weekly show doesn’t have.

The argument for nightly shows is that the fixed costs — the writers, the staff, etc. — are there, so you should get as much product out of that as you can. Doesn’t that make weekly shows much more expensive?

Nightly shows are definitely more cost-effective on a per-episode basis.

So why not do The President Show two nights a week?

The president himself has shown that too much of a good thing is too much of a good thing. [Laughs.] That show takes advantage of opportunities afforded to it by running one night a week. When you do it more than once a week, you would start running into production limitations that cut into what they’re able to do in that weekly episode.

Is Comedy Central airing weekly shows and nightly shows partly the product of experimentation, or do you have a solid idea why certain shows make more sense nightly and certain other shows make more sense weekly?

The Opposition with Jordan Klepper is a nightly show. We had the preeminent lineup in late night with Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and now we feel secure that we’ll have that going forward with Trevor Noah and Jordan Klepper. The President Show was pitched to us as a weekly show, and it makes sense as a weekly show. Jim Jeffries pitched his show as a weekly show, and we developed it as a weekly show. Our talent drives the vision for their shows, and that’s what matters the most to us.

Are there things a weekly show can do in terms of scale — field pieces, how you use guests, etc. — that a nightly show can’t do?

Absolutely, but we’re doing a lot of things at scale on The Daily Show, which has an incredibly strong team of correspondents doing field pieces at a very high level. Jim Jefferies is involving himself in field pieces in a way he would not be able to do on a nightly show.

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.

Stream The Opposition with Jordan Klepper on Comedy Central