Stephen Colbert's Cancellation is Only the Beginning, and the Death of Late Night Talk Shows is Inevitable at This Point
As I mentioned the morning after The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was canceled:
... CBS' decision was just part of a broader shift in how Americans get their news and entertainment:
If you're at all a fan watching history unfold before our very eyes, then the next few months and years are going to be fascinating for a lot of reasons.
One, the revolution in media is happening faster than anyone could've possibly imagined. Cable is on its deathbed. The networks are following an old template for programming that hasn't got long to live. Practically no one under the age of about 70 is getting their news from the networks any more. They've spent 10 years now going all in on being the opposition to Trump, even when he wasn't in office. Now both ABC and CBS have had to pay a combined $30 million to build a presidential library in his honor. And look to all the world like they're bending the knee as much as possible. Firing the most popular (non-right wing) host in Late Night in what looks unmistakably like an attempt to curry favor with the guy who'll be in charge of the country for 3 1/2 more years.
No matter where you are politically, watching this play out in real time is wild. You couldn't have seen this coming as recently as a year ago. And there's no way to predict where it's all heading. But regardless, it's going to be interesting as all hell to see it happen.
But I'll actually contradict my own self here with regards to the "no way to predict" line. Now that we've had a few days to think this over, it seems entirely predictable where this is all heading. There can be no better illustration than the fact a video Dave threw together on his phone, speaking extemporaneously in one take from his multimillion dollar mansion, is over 5 million views. Which is more than double Colbert's nightly audience of 2.42 million. (With a pathetic 219,000 in the only demo his advertisers care about.) As Dave correctly points out, that's the return Paramount has been getting for their $100 million investment, The Late Show's 200 person staff, and an annual loss of $40 million.
But like I pointed out and Dave mentioned, somehow the left is in denial that the decision is solely about Profits vs. Losses:
Which I suppose makes sense, since that's the audience show like Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers have been catering to. Almost exclusively. To the point where their guests are almost exclusively left-leaning or liberal political figures:
News Busters - For the men of the late night comedy talk shows, the first half of 2025 was an instance of history repeating itself. According to a NewsBusters study, 99 percent of their political guests were on the left, matching the result for the last six months of 2024.
The grand totals were 106 liberals and Democrats compared to one conservative. …
When it came to partisan officials, the count was 30 Democrats to 0 Republicans.
That's a business model that's simply not sustainable. These shows have told at least half the country they're not welcome there. There should be a reckoning throughout the Late Night Talk genre that pivoting away from comedy with broad appeal that built the very successful careers of Carson, Letterman, Leno and Conan for over 50 years has destroyed their industry. They divided their audience along sociopolitical lines. With predictable results:
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Yet rather than take a look at the numbers, the dwindling audience, the sheer economics of it, the people who are invested in having this kind of narrow-cast content on three different networks every night are making excuses. Instead of dealing with reality on reality's terms, they're blaming it on mergers and regulators and the President of the United States:
Rolling Stone - Colbert has been one of the most vocal critics of the current administration of anyone on television. It requires precious little imagination to see the cancellation of Late Show — a decision that its host was blatantly displeased with — as a quid pro quo to get the FCC to approve the merger. If so, it wouldn’t be the first time a media company has bent the knee to the president since the most recent election. …
In this era where no one fears saying the quiet part out loud, satire feels increasingly difficult. …
There’s a lot of excellent work still being done on these shows, and being done by Stephen Colbert. If his material wasn’t hitting its mark, he would probably still have a job a year from now. …
Now that CBS has shuttered its talk-show apparatus altogether, it’s going to be easier for NBC and ABC executives to look at their own and question whether they still need to keep making them. Maybe the next one to go will happen when one of the hosts’ contracts is up, or if Meyers or Kimmel simply decide they’ve had enough of the nightly grind. It might take a while, but this very much feels like the beginning of the end for this format that has been around practically since television has existed as a mass medium.
After getting this so terribly wrong for most of this article, and semi-suggesting that CBS somehow owes it to the small subset of people actually watching Colbert to keep losing $40 million a year, at least that last paragraph above gets it right. These shows are dying. If they're not already dead. Meyers had to fire his band in a cost-savings move. Fallon has had layoffs. Kimmel and Fallon might not be far behind getting the axe. At least according to the same guy who's being blamed for Colbert's demise:
Late Night is simply and outdated model, both of business and entertainment. Which, with the exception of the right-leaning Gutfeld! on Fox News, which draws a million more viewers for a fraction of the cost of Colbert's show, all made a conscious decision to tell half their audience this humor is not for them. Credit to Sherwood News for the graphic that illustrates what that bold strategy look like:
It's not a matter of whether Late Night can survive. It's a Dead Format Walking already. It's only matter of when the official time of death will be. The cause of death will be simple enough:
Suicide.