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Did Craig Ferguson Ditch Audience to Save Money? Rep Calls Charge "Laughable"
by Gary Susman, posted Feb 26th 2010 4:10PM
As brilliant an hour of television as Craig Ferguson's Tuesday night show was - featuring just Craig and a single guest, fellow wit and raconteur Stephen Fry, chatting for an hour before no audience - could it be that the episode was less an experiment in reviving old-school Tom Snyder/Dick Cavett-style TV conversation and more an experiment in cutting costs?That was the spin according to a report from Radar Online. The website quotes an unnamed insider as saying that 'The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson' has to pay audience members $20 each to fill some 50 seats at each night's taping, that such a practice is unique among late-night talk shows, and that Tuesday's show was more about saving CBS $1,000 on seat-fillers than about creating a more highbrow hour of television.
AOL TV did some digging of our own and found that, while there is a kernel of truth to this story -- CBS does sometimes pay seat-fillers to attend 'Late Late Show' tapings -- it's not a unique practice, though it's also not a routine one at the 'Late Late Show,' and was not the reason for taping Tuesday's show in an empty studio.
Radar quotes the insider as saying that 'The Late Late Show' uses a third-party audience-recruiting service to fill 50 or so seats in Ferguson's studio that would otherwise go empty each night. The studio seats about 100 people, with 10 house seats reserved for VIPs and only 30 or 40 going to fans who requested tickets, the source said.
Traditionally, talk shows, game shows, and other TV programs taped before a live audience have given tickets for free to fans who send requests to a waiting list. "No one else in late night pays for any portion of their audience," claimed Radar's source. "There's beyond enough of a demand for tickets to Jay Leno, David Letterman, Jimmy Kimmel, and Jimmy Fallon" -- and those hosts have twice as many seats to fill as Ferguson does.
Radar's story seemed dubious to AOL TV. First, the 'Late Late Show' is very cheap already -- there's no band, no sidekick, practically no set. It's just Craig and his hand puppets, his desk, and a guest or two. Can CBS really need to save $1,000 that badly? Second, Ferguson is popular enough to beat timeslot rival Fallon routinely in the ratings. Are there really not even 100 fans in Los Angeles every day who would attend a Ferguson taping for free?
Radar's source seemed to agree on this point. "Why Craig has to pay people to sit through his show is beyond me," the insider told Radar. "It's even more funny that when he stopped, everyone is lauding him for 'breaking the mold.' He hasn't done anything original! This was a decision based solely on need."
AOL TV spoke to a rep from the show who confirmed that the 'Late Late Show' does occasionally use a studio-recruitment service to fill a handful of seats at $20 a pop, but so do other shows. "Like many other television shows taped in front of an audience daily, we retain an audience consultant to occasionally fill in a small number of available seats shortly before we tape, when needed," the spokesperson said. "These instances are rare -- we have not made use of any seat-fillers in nearly two months -- and they almost never number more than 10."
Consequently, the spokesperson told AOL TV, there's no truth to the assertion that Tuesday's no-audience episode was "a decision based solely on need." Said the rep, "The show we recently taped without an audience was Craig's idea and is among the many creative formats -- much like our recent all-puppet show -- with which we have experimented over the years. Any inference that we would tape a show without an audience to save $200 at most is laughable."
Laughable, eh? Maybe Ferguson can turn it into joke fodder.
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