AFTERNOON IS TV NEWS PRIME TIME
Viewers are dipping in before dinner and then drifting away
There’s a new prime time in TV news: the afternoons.
The biggest draw on Fox News is not Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity; it’s “The Five,” the 5 p.m. chat show that, except for live sports and the hit drama “Yellowstone,” was last year’s mostwatched program on all of cable TV.
In January, Ari Melber’s 6 p.m. legal affairs program outranked everything else on MSNBC — the first time in the network’s 27 years that a show outside the prime-time window of 8 to 11 p.m. took top honors. On CNN, Erin Burnett at 7 p.m. and Jake Tapper at 4 p.m. drew bigger audiences than the once-peerless evening lineup.
Twenty-four-hour cable networks have long fixated on the cult of prime time, when megawatt personalities like Keith Olbermann, Megyn Kelly and Rachel Maddow minted loyal fans. Anchors’ careers peaked when they landed a show at these most watched and most lucrative hours of the day.
Now, like almost everything else in the TV news business, that’s changing. Instead of flipping on CNN at 8 p.m. for the latest on the presidency or the pandemic, viewers are dipping in before dinner and then drifting away. Melber and Nicolle Wallace, who hosts a 4 p.m. show, expanded their audiences in the past year, even as ratings for
most prime-time news shows declined or stagnated.
The reasons are myriad. Without the visceral urgency of a dangerous virus — or a sitting president who tweets erratically late into the night — America’s news obsessives may simply feel more comfortable changing the channel in the evenings rather than waiting on tenterhooks for the latest development. At the same time, prime-time stars like Maddow have moved on from their regular time slots.
“The biggest show on earth, the Trump administration, is over for now,” said Mosheh Oinounou, a former “CBS Evening News” executive producer. “It’s no different from traditional TV; the plot is less interesting, and some of the characters have left the show.”
Cable news is also facing its toughest competitor yet:
streaming.
Americans older than 65 are the core audience of 24/7 news channels, but these older viewers are increasingly turning to streaming platforms like Netflix or Amazon Prime for their entertainment. According to Nielsen, Americans older than 65 watched nearly twice as many hours of streaming television in December 2022 as they did in December 2020 — the biggest increase among any age demographic in that period.
For network executives, the trends have scrambled a few long-standing assumptions.
For one thing, prime-time hosts don’t necessarily have to be the omnipresent cultural figures they once were — and salaries can be adjusted downward accordingly. And the evening does not necessarily have to be reserved
for reviewing the day’s news. Producers can experiment with documentaries and other nonfiction programming that may draw bigger audiences.
Typically, prime-time viewers tune in by appointment, expecting to see a familiar face discuss the news of the day. But CNN said last month that it would fill its empty 9 p.m. slot with a mélange of one-off specials and occasional cameos by unorthodox hosts like former basketball star Charles Barkley.
The network’s new president, Chris Licht, has presented this strategy as bringing “fresh and unique perspectives to the news,” but it’s also a recognition that the appetite for current events in the evenings has waned.