In keeping with the growing obsolescence of straightforward news—which is something that people who are generally too tired to stay up late anyway are interested in—ABC announced today that it has decided to move its long-running Nightline back an hour, replacing it with Jimmy Kimmel Live in the 11:35 p.m. ET slot. It's a shake-up that pits Kimmel squarely against the elder statesmen of having seen this and having heard about this, Jay Leno and David Letterman, with Kimmel now poised to make a run at taking down the shows that have been struggling for profits and enduring serious downsizing lately. It also gives him a head start on their presumed successors (assuming that Jay Leno ever agrees to stop). Anyway, the move goes into effect on January 7, with Nightline gaining the consolation prize of a new primetime "digest" hour that begins running Fridays in March. And this relatively bloodless, benign coup means that Bill Carter's next sequel to The Late Shift just got its first kinda boring chapter.
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