September 26, 2025 • 10 mins
Dr. Bob Thompson revealed that the Jeopardy premiere had more viewers. Bob also talks about Baywatch getting a reboot on Fox!
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
To go over to the Legacy Retirement Group dot com
phone line and say good morning to our friend, doctor
Bob Thompson from Sarah Hughes University, Professor of pop Culture.
And it doesn't get more pop culture than the ongoing
saga of Jimmy Kimmel. Bob and we talked this time
last week, and you know, at that point he was
indefinitely suspended, well apparently according to ABC, and definitely means
(00:21):
he'll miss about four shows.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Yeah, I don't think he missed. Let's see, he was,
he was on Tuesday, he missed Wednesday, he missed Thursday. Friday,
they're not on, and he is Monday.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
He only missed three Risha, I forgot about Friday. That's it.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah, okay, here's I mean, here's a nice bit of data.
And yeah, you're right. I forget how quickly this happened.
Two things have happened since you uh, since we talked
last He was reinstated and then he had his big
first night. But so amids all this. We talked about this,
I think last week. No we didn't because he hadn't
been reinstated. So Disney, this huge company that controls ESPN
(00:57):
and Star Wars and the Marvel Universe and ABC. As
John Stewart said, the single place you have to go
if you want to watch Monday Night Football or see
We Need the Pooh, you have to go to the
same place. Anyway, this huge organization has done the amazing
(01:18):
accomplishment of managing to make the entire country hate them.
They kicked Kimmel off and fifty percent of the people
hate them, and then they obviously didn't kind of figure
how out this all was going to happen, and they
put him back on and the other fifty percent of
the people hate them. So the public relations hat trick
(01:39):
of getting everybody mad at you, and then amidst all that,
if you've been paying attention, they came up with their
third rat increase for Disney Plus and Hulu on a
DESPN in three years. So Disney Plus without ads has
gone up from nine ninety nine to eleven ninety nine,
AD free from fifteen ninety nine to eighteen ninety nine.
(02:02):
So as they're showing their just incredible incompetence across the
board of managing their images, they're raising their price.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Anyway, I thought that was.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
An interesting accompaniment to the Kimmel story.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
I'm glad you brought that up, because I was going
to if you didn't.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
It's like, you know, and we've talked about this too before, Bob,
is that you know you're going to pay twenty bucks
a month now essentially nineteen bucks a month to not
have commercials.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
And I thought that was the.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Whole point of streaming anyway, was to not have commercials.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Well, that was debate and switch. I mean, that's exactly right,
that was the big argument, and people started making shows
without breaks on the commercials, and now they're back and
they come in in uncomfortable places and all of that.
But that Kimmel Return did get a six point three
million viewers in regular terms, and that's the highest it's
(02:53):
ever gotten in its twenty two years. And it also
got on YouTube twelve million viewers in twelve hours. I
think it was up to fifteen and fourteen hours or
fourteen million and fifteen hours whatever, So it was clearly watched.
An awful lot of people watched that show who had
probably never seen it before. When he came back on
what was it.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Tuesday, Tuesday Night?
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Yeah, six point three million is a big number, and
that's compared to his typical averages about a million and
a half to a million seven or so. Yeah, he
was up, Do you have numbers? So that was Tuesday night,
his return after the suspension. Do you have the numbers
from Wednesday?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I don't, but that will be really interesting to see.
Then those should actually be out. I haven't seen them,
reported me. I look at them within about twenty four hours.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
I looked this morning. I didn't see them. I saw
the streaming. Streaming numbers were still very strong.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yes, that's what I was going to say, is people
are still looking and he's still talking about the suspension.
But to put this in a larger perspective, so you
get six point three, and you're right, the streaming numbers
are way up in the tens of millions as a
different But let's take that six point three, which is
watching it the old fashioned way. That's a lot highest
he's ever had. But then if we compare that to
(04:08):
the season premiere of Jeopardy, a show which has been
around in one way or another since nineteen sixty four,
sixty one years, it got a seven point five million audience.
So all of this is huge. I mean, Kimmel was
the biggest story of the week everybody was talking about it.
He comes back with six point three. It gives us
(04:31):
a sense of where a show like Jeopardy still is
when it with nobody paying any attention, beats it by
a million two and also is up from last year.
And so Jeopardy is now back the number one syndication
show in the country, which has been for a while.
But if we look at the Top four and syndication
(04:52):
is the stuff that the network doesn't provide, they sell
it station by station. The Top four and syndication, our Jeopardy,
Wheel of Fortune is and Entertainment Tonight. Wow, Jeopardy is
sixty one years old. Wheel of Fortune is fifty years old,
Entertainment Tonight is forty four years old, and Inside Edition,
the youngster of the Top four is a mere thirty six.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
That's incredible, It really is.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
That is really and I would hazard the guests with
the average age of the viewers of those shows are,
if they've been watching Jeopardy for your entire life, probably.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Well, I'm tempted to say the average age of these
is probably higher than the age of any of the shows.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
One and I'm not kidding you're probably.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
The average age of those are all in the mid
to upper sixties. The networks are all averaging in the
upper sixties at this point.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Well, and what does that tell you about people's preferred
content choice too? I mean it tells you a lot
when you're looking at game shows at top of the heap,
with Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, you know, versus politically
charged late night show and Kimmel.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Well, it does. And we have to be careful because
there's a lot of variables. But yes, there is a
sense across the board that all of these shows are
easy to watch. Ye really kind of completely non confrontational.
And if you go after the top four, it's a
lot of those judge shows which are also easy to watch.
They're confrontational, but in a different kind of way. The
(06:23):
other thing, though, we have to remember is most people
see these syndication shows in that period between five o'clock
and primetime, so five and eights, that's what they that's
fair most show these all and that's a time when everybody,
you know, the kids are coming home, you're transitioning from
life outside to life inside, and oftentimes you're not in
(06:44):
the room. You turn these things on and you're you know,
making the dinner or you know, seeing the kids home whatever. Sure,
and all of these shows are really easy to watch.
You can watch Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, Inside Edition, any
of these and you can be in the kitchen. You
don't need to be in eye contact. You've missed huge
chunks of it, so that may be a little part
(07:05):
of it. But I do think you're onto something that
there is when you look at the most popular shows
across the board in streaming series and all this kind
of thing, these old school We talked about this a
couple of weeks ago. Gun Smoke, which has been off
the ear since seventy five, was in the top twenty
streaming series of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
So far's yeah, it's incredible. And in time of day
does plays play a huge role. I mean, I would
imagine Kimmel would have a different audience if he was
on in primetime versus late at night.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
But you know, well, remember well Leno, they tried putting
Leno on primetime, remember to satisfy Kimmel and lead during
that whole brew haha, and it did terribly prime in primetime,
which reminds me remember David Letterman started his series career
in daytime.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Remember, yes, he was.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
At ten o'clock shot in the nineteen eighty It lasted
till about Christmas. But wow, if you ever get a
chance to watch some of those those are incredibly peculiar.
Well he is, I mean that's incredibly peculiar.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Yeah, that Kookie humor was. I mean we were just
Letterman fanatics in college. I mean at his peak. There's
no doubt. Speaking with doctor Bob, pop culture professor at
Syracuse University, and I see Baywatch is getting a little
reboot from Fox.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, twelve episodes on Fox, the main network for twenty
six twenty seven, and I don't know, depending on the
age of your viewers, but Baywatch in its peak and
it went from it went only one season on NBC.
NBC canceled that after only one season, and then it
(08:47):
went for ten more in syndication. So it straddled the nineties.
It was eighty nine to two thousand and one, and
in its peak during that period, it was the most
popular television show on planet Earth. Wow, it had over
a billion viewers every week in two hundred countries. So
(09:11):
it was never in the top ten in the United States.
It was a syndicated show rather than a network show
for most of its era, and it wasn't getting you know,
the kinds of numbers that the you know back then
that the you know, Friends in Seinfeld and all those
shows were getting. But nevertheless, overall, if we look completely global,
(09:32):
it was getting over a billion a week. It was
an incredibly popular show. And think of some of the
people that it helped to launch. Not hassle Off, he'd
already done Night Rider, but Pamela Anderson, Yasmine, Bleek Bleef,
Carmen Electra, and the one I always forget because he
(09:52):
was toward the very end. He was in the last
two seasons when they moved to Hawaii. Jason Momoa had
his very first professional acting on Baywatch.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
I forgot about that too.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
That's incredible looking at the cast now, of course, Pamela
Anderson looks a lot different now than she did that.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
It's unbelievable that he's developed into a much more serious career.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Yeah, yeah, it's wild.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Who would have got a drama show about lifeguards would
have been the most popular show on planet Earth for
a while.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
I was on you remember when A and E. Sho's biographies. Yeah,
and I used to be interviewed for those, and we
did a bunch of them. They were an hour long,
and it came time to do the Pamela Anderson one
and her biography could not be contained in a single hour.
They had to expand it to a two hour, two
part series.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
That's so good.
To go over to the Legacy Retirement Group dot com
phone line and say good morning to our friend, doctor
Bob Thompson from Sarah Hughes University, Professor of pop Culture.
And it doesn't get more pop culture than the ongoing
saga of Jimmy Kimmel. Bob and we talked this time
last week, and you know, at that point he was
indefinitely suspended, well apparently according to ABC, and definitely means
(00:21):
he'll miss about four shows.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
Yeah, I don't think he missed. Let's see, he was,
he was on Tuesday, he missed Wednesday, he missed Thursday. Friday,
they're not on, and he is Monday.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
He only missed three Risha, I forgot about Friday. That's it.
Speaker 2 (00:34):
Yeah, okay, here's I mean, here's a nice bit of data.
And yeah, you're right. I forget how quickly this happened.
Two things have happened since you uh, since we talked
last He was reinstated and then he had his big
first night. But so amids all this. We talked about this,
I think last week. No we didn't because he hadn't
been reinstated. So Disney, this huge company that controls ESPN
(00:57):
and Star Wars and the Marvel Universe and ABC. As
John Stewart said, the single place you have to go
if you want to watch Monday Night Football or see
We Need the Pooh, you have to go to the
same place. Anyway, this huge organization has done the amazing
(01:18):
accomplishment of managing to make the entire country hate them.
They kicked Kimmel off and fifty percent of the people
hate them, and then they obviously didn't kind of figure
how out this all was going to happen, and they
put him back on and the other fifty percent of
the people hate them. So the public relations hat trick
(01:39):
of getting everybody mad at you, and then amidst all that,
if you've been paying attention, they came up with their
third rat increase for Disney Plus and Hulu on a
DESPN in three years. So Disney Plus without ads has
gone up from nine ninety nine to eleven ninety nine,
AD free from fifteen ninety nine to eighteen ninety nine.
(02:02):
So as they're showing their just incredible incompetence across the
board of managing their images, they're raising their price.
Speaker 3 (02:12):
Anyway, I thought that was.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
An interesting accompaniment to the Kimmel story.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
I'm glad you brought that up, because I was going
to if you didn't.
Speaker 1 (02:18):
It's like, you know, and we've talked about this too before, Bob,
is that you know you're going to pay twenty bucks
a month now essentially nineteen bucks a month to not
have commercials.
Speaker 3 (02:28):
And I thought that was the.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Whole point of streaming anyway, was to not have commercials.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
Well, that was debate and switch. I mean, that's exactly right,
that was the big argument, and people started making shows
without breaks on the commercials, and now they're back and
they come in in uncomfortable places and all of that.
But that Kimmel Return did get a six point three
million viewers in regular terms, and that's the highest it's
(02:53):
ever gotten in its twenty two years. And it also
got on YouTube twelve million viewers in twelve hours. I
think it was up to fifteen and fourteen hours or
fourteen million and fifteen hours whatever, So it was clearly watched.
An awful lot of people watched that show who had
probably never seen it before. When he came back on
what was it.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
Tuesday, Tuesday Night?
Speaker 1 (03:13):
Yeah, six point three million is a big number, and
that's compared to his typical averages about a million and
a half to a million seven or so. Yeah, he
was up, Do you have numbers? So that was Tuesday night,
his return after the suspension. Do you have the numbers
from Wednesday?
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I don't, but that will be really interesting to see.
Then those should actually be out. I haven't seen them,
reported me. I look at them within about twenty four hours.
Speaker 1 (03:40):
I looked this morning. I didn't see them. I saw
the streaming. Streaming numbers were still very strong.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Yes, that's what I was going to say, is people
are still looking and he's still talking about the suspension.
But to put this in a larger perspective, so you
get six point three, and you're right, the streaming numbers
are way up in the tens of millions as a
different But let's take that six point three, which is
watching it the old fashioned way. That's a lot highest
he's ever had. But then if we compare that to
(04:08):
the season premiere of Jeopardy, a show which has been
around in one way or another since nineteen sixty four,
sixty one years, it got a seven point five million audience.
So all of this is huge. I mean, Kimmel was
the biggest story of the week everybody was talking about it.
He comes back with six point three. It gives us
(04:31):
a sense of where a show like Jeopardy still is
when it with nobody paying any attention, beats it by
a million two and also is up from last year.
And so Jeopardy is now back the number one syndication
show in the country, which has been for a while.
But if we look at the Top four and syndication
(04:52):
is the stuff that the network doesn't provide, they sell
it station by station. The Top four and syndication, our Jeopardy,
Wheel of Fortune is and Entertainment Tonight. Wow, Jeopardy is
sixty one years old. Wheel of Fortune is fifty years old,
Entertainment Tonight is forty four years old, and Inside Edition,
the youngster of the Top four is a mere thirty six.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
That's incredible, It really is.
Speaker 1 (05:18):
That is really and I would hazard the guests with
the average age of the viewers of those shows are,
if they've been watching Jeopardy for your entire life, probably.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Well, I'm tempted to say the average age of these
is probably higher than the age of any of the shows.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
One and I'm not kidding you're probably.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
The average age of those are all in the mid
to upper sixties. The networks are all averaging in the
upper sixties at this point.
Speaker 1 (05:47):
Well, and what does that tell you about people's preferred
content choice too? I mean it tells you a lot
when you're looking at game shows at top of the heap,
with Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, you know, versus politically
charged late night show and Kimmel.
Speaker 2 (06:02):
Well, it does. And we have to be careful because
there's a lot of variables. But yes, there is a
sense across the board that all of these shows are
easy to watch. Ye really kind of completely non confrontational.
And if you go after the top four, it's a
lot of those judge shows which are also easy to watch.
They're confrontational, but in a different kind of way. The
(06:23):
other thing, though, we have to remember is most people
see these syndication shows in that period between five o'clock
and primetime, so five and eights, that's what they that's
fair most show these all and that's a time when everybody,
you know, the kids are coming home, you're transitioning from
life outside to life inside, and oftentimes you're not in
(06:44):
the room. You turn these things on and you're you know,
making the dinner or you know, seeing the kids home whatever. Sure,
and all of these shows are really easy to watch.
You can watch Jeopardy, Wheel of Fortune, Inside Edition, any
of these and you can be in the kitchen. You
don't need to be in eye contact. You've missed huge
chunks of it, so that may be a little part
(07:05):
of it. But I do think you're onto something that
there is when you look at the most popular shows
across the board in streaming series and all this kind
of thing, these old school We talked about this a
couple of weeks ago. Gun Smoke, which has been off
the ear since seventy five, was in the top twenty
streaming series of twenty twenty five.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
So far's yeah, it's incredible. And in time of day
does plays play a huge role. I mean, I would
imagine Kimmel would have a different audience if he was
on in primetime versus late at night.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
But you know, well, remember well Leno, they tried putting
Leno on primetime, remember to satisfy Kimmel and lead during
that whole brew haha, and it did terribly prime in primetime,
which reminds me remember David Letterman started his series career
in daytime.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
Remember, yes, he was.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
At ten o'clock shot in the nineteen eighty It lasted
till about Christmas. But wow, if you ever get a
chance to watch some of those those are incredibly peculiar.
Well he is, I mean that's incredibly peculiar.
Speaker 1 (08:12):
Yeah, that Kookie humor was. I mean we were just
Letterman fanatics in college. I mean at his peak. There's
no doubt. Speaking with doctor Bob, pop culture professor at
Syracuse University, and I see Baywatch is getting a little
reboot from Fox.
Speaker 2 (08:27):
Yeah, twelve episodes on Fox, the main network for twenty
six twenty seven, and I don't know, depending on the
age of your viewers, but Baywatch in its peak and
it went from it went only one season on NBC.
NBC canceled that after only one season, and then it
(08:47):
went for ten more in syndication. So it straddled the nineties.
It was eighty nine to two thousand and one, and
in its peak during that period, it was the most
popular television show on planet Earth. Wow, it had over
a billion viewers every week in two hundred countries. So
(09:11):
it was never in the top ten in the United States.
It was a syndicated show rather than a network show
for most of its era, and it wasn't getting you know,
the kinds of numbers that the you know back then
that the you know, Friends in Seinfeld and all those
shows were getting. But nevertheless, overall, if we look completely global,
(09:32):
it was getting over a billion a week. It was
an incredibly popular show. And think of some of the
people that it helped to launch. Not hassle Off, he'd
already done Night Rider, but Pamela Anderson, Yasmine, Bleek Bleef,
Carmen Electra, and the one I always forget because he
(09:52):
was toward the very end. He was in the last
two seasons when they moved to Hawaii. Jason Momoa had
his very first professional acting on Baywatch.
Speaker 3 (10:00):
I forgot about that too.
Speaker 1 (10:02):
That's incredible looking at the cast now, of course, Pamela
Anderson looks a lot different now than she did that.
Speaker 2 (10:07):
It's unbelievable that he's developed into a much more serious career.
Speaker 3 (10:11):
Yeah, yeah, it's wild.
Speaker 1 (10:13):
Who would have got a drama show about lifeguards would
have been the most popular show on planet Earth for
a while.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
Unbelievable.
Speaker 2 (10:20):
I was on you remember when A and E. Sho's biographies. Yeah,
and I used to be interviewed for those, and we
did a bunch of them. They were an hour long,
and it came time to do the Pamela Anderson one
and her biography could not be contained in a single hour.
They had to expand it to a two hour, two
part series.
Speaker 3 (10:38):
That's so good.
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