Earlier this year Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon began another era of late show switch-ups as Meyers moved to Late Night and Fallon took control of the Tonight Show after Jay Leno. Now the cycle has begun again; since 67-year-old David Letterman has announced his retirement, the public will be forced to suffer through the never ending news coverage of who will replace him, and any other drama that will undoubtedly go along with it. That’s the thing about talk shows, if one were to begin channel surfing around 10:00 p.m., they would really only have one option: talk shows. There are 21 night time talk shows that air, which is a ridiculous number that needs to be decreased in order to avoid more drama amongst the larger networks. Since there are so many different shows it creates a childish competition of who can get the most attention from viewers and actors.

It’s typical for actors or actresses to travel around to various talk shows to promote the movies they’re working on, but when it’s the same people jumping from show to show, it tends to get rather repetitive. Seeing the same faces multiple times a night wouldn’t be such a problem, except that all of the hosts of these shows ask the same mundane questions like what the movie is about and how the actor felt about por- traying the role. It’s true that these shows can be entertaining and even funny, but there are so many shows, and there’s nothing to set any one show apart from the rest of the late night shows that are on every other channel. The smart thing to do would be to put quality before quantity and lower the number of shows on a particular network and really focus on making the content innovative and fun for the audience, but that could mean losing potential ratings, and that’s a risk the networks could never take.

Monologues are another staple among the late night crowd, and these usually consist of a few minutes of the host or hostess making fun of whatever is going on in pop culture. This practice once again becomes monotonous; there are only so many jokes about Obamacare and Rob Ford that can be made before it gets a little ridiculous. But when there are 21 shows, all airing within a few hours of each other, it’s tough to be original. The easy fix would be to get rid of some of the shows that come on later, but the networks could never do that because they must always be in constant competition to see who can get the highest ratings, and even though less people watch those shows, they still have better ratings than if there wasn’t a show in that slot. It’s exactly this sense of competing that makes these shows so difficult to watch.

Not only are the networks competing with one another, the same network has even turned on itself in the past and had its hosts fighting with each other in the public eye. According to the Huffington Post back in 2010, a war ensued between Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien, when NBC went behind Leno’s back about transitioning The Tonight Show to O’Brien, which ended in O’Brien walking away from NBC and Leno taking back his seat as host. This entire battle was just a disagreement between grown men who were acting like children. It could have and should have been avoided by retiring Leno and letting O’Brien take his place, but now O’Brien has his own show and hosting The Tonight Show has been passed down to Jimmy Fallon. The large networks are so concerned with money and ratings that instead of decreasing the number of hosts, they let the hosts throw tantrums and then the hosts move networks and start their own shows which perpetuates the drama.

Every few years the public has to endure the drama of the elderly hosts being replaced with younger doppelgangers of themselves, and it’s begun once again. It’s time to stop looking to improve or expand, the networks need to work with what they’ve got before they think about making any kind of major changes. If the networks would focus on the shows they have now, they can take the time to find strong hosts, and make their shows more original. Imagine turning on your TV and flipping through channels, and instead of seeing 21 different options for talk shows, there is only one per network, but that show is exciting and original. That’s where networks should be with their shows.