CHANNEL ISLAND

Late-night TV is in the greatest state of flux the industry has seen in years.

NBC, the late-night TV leader, announced last year that Jay Leno -- after handing “The Tonight Show” to Conan O’Brien -- will take over the 10 p.m. slot on weeknights starting this fall. These moves have evidently prompted ABC to mull promoting Jimmy Kimmel to 11:35 p.m., which would apparently kill off “Nightline.” And CBS is reportedly talking with David Letterman about renewing his current contract, set to expire next year. The moves would thus make all three networks compete head-to-head with talk shows that would draw on the same pool of celebrity guests.

Once a programming backwater, late night looks a lot sexier to programmers these days. Talk shows are relatively inexpensive to make (once you get past the salary of the host, which in Letterman’s case runs around $30 million annually), and producers can easily churn out 200 episodes a year. Simply put, these shows deliver a high rate of return on a very low investment. Who cares if they don’t repeat well? The TV business, like most industries these days, is in sheer survival mode.

From that standpoint, the Letterman move makes perfect sense. Clearly the host is at least a decade past his prime, but even at age 61 he’s still the best practitioner of the form, as his tiff with Sen. John McCain during the presidential campaign demonstrated. (Favorite recent moment: Guest Meryl Streep, hacking and sniffling from a bad respiratory infection, explained to Letterman that she trooped to his studio anyway because, she said with a smile, “I was afraid to cancel.”)

As for ABC, well, it’s been obvious that executives there have had an epic love/hate relationship with the “Nightline” franchise for many years. But the news of their latest deliberations was still a bit surprising. As Time’s James Poniewozik has pointed out, “Nightline” and Kimmel both do pretty well where they are, so why move one, kill the other and risk upsetting that exquisite balance? In fact, this season “Nightline” has pulled even in the ratings with CBS’ “Late Show With David Letterman,” averaging 3.9 million total viewers apiece (compared with 5 million for “The Tonight Show”), according to Nielsen Media Research.

But ABC is having trouble letting go of the dream, first hatched earlier in this decade by the now-departed programming chief Lloyd Braun, that Kimmel was destined to be late-night’s chairman of the board. The problem is, there is little evidence that is ever going to happen. At 12:05 a.m., Kimmel has averaged 1.8 million total viewers this season -- a respectable total, given the hour, but one that Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” often exceeds.

For ABC -- and any other also-ran that dreams of late-night conquest, including Fox -- the real problem isn’t O’Brien or Letterman, but rather Stewart, Stephen Colbert and any number of other as-yet-unheralded late-night contenders who other basic-cable networks will inevitably trot out in the years hence.

Leno’s audience skews fairly old, and his move into prime time probably will take more than a few of the over-50s with him. That will leave an audience that’s disproportionately young and male. This crowd tends to favor the new and the off-the-wall. It made Colbert a hit. Ditto Adult Swim.

So in a time of great uncertainty for late-night TV in general, the one thing that can be confidently predicted is that the genre’s next great shift likely will come from someone other than the big players currently playing musical chairs.

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scott.collins@latimes.com