Without them, there may not even be late-night talk shows anymore, and they certainly wouldn’t be what they are today. However, perhaps most importantly, it must be stated there have been some legendary classic late-night talk show hosts such as Ed Sullivan, Jack Paar, Dick Cavett, Alan Carr, Merv Griffin, and Steve Allen. It’s also worth noting, there have been some wonderful international late-night talk shows in the UK hosted by Graham Norton, Jonathan Ross, and Jools Holland, to name a few. Honorable mentions must go to contemporary-era hosts such as Jay Leno, Amber Ruffin, Chelsea Handler, Bill Maher, Samantha Bee, Craig Kilborn, Joan Rivers, and Craig Ferguson, among others, who could easily have been on this list. While this list is not extensive, the contributions of the dozens of late-night hosts over the past six and a half decades should be acknowledged for their impact on pop culture. The format itself and the way people watch late-night talk shows has clearly changed. In turn, this has led to lower ratings of the overall shows themselves on TV, while simultaneously garnering millions of additional views of specific late-night talk show highlights online.

There’s a regular onslaught of late-night talk show clips posted to social media on a near-daily basis, trying to become the next viral video everyone will share with their friends. Nowadays, you don’t even need to own a television to watch late-night talk shows.

Because of this, the audiences are further split than ever before by all the options available to them, diversifying the type of late-night shows out there. As television later expanded into cable networks, 24-hour programming, and now with streaming and the Internet, there is a much larger desire for content and many more outlets in order to find it. This meant they controlled the late-night talk show landscape an entire generation first grew up watching. For years, there were a very limited number of television stations even in existence in the United States, with only three major networks – NBC, CBS, and ABC - available nationally. Late-night talk shows have been a critical part of television history since practically the very beginning of TV as a popular medium in the 1950s.

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