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Late night isn't dead. Yet.
But its future, which was never exactly bright, might be cratering. The hoary format's downward slide has, up unto this point, been comparatively slow, with advertising dollars dwindling and viewership declining as audiences drift to faster, more casual platforms. But the financial pressures, together with a vengeful president and a corporate culture willing to appease him, might be more than the genre can withstand.
The occasion for this pre-mortem is, of course, the firing of Stephen Colbert, who announced two weeks ago that Paramount Global, CBS' parent company, is canceling "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert." The talk show will end in May, and so will the whole "Late Show" franchise that began with David Letterman when the latter decamped from NBC (where he hosted "Late Night") to CBS in 1993. It is, in other words, the end of a TV institution.
How much this matters depends on one's attachment to Colbert's show and to late night generally. The latter has endured as a genial American cultural tradition laced with just enough residual Protestantism to be bold but also unreasonable: It requires groundbreaking, brilliant, irreverent comics to amuse us with middlebrow material while wearing respectable suits. The significance of losing that tranche of reliable, half-scripted infotainment depends, too, on one's interpretation of Colbert's cancellation. There are two complementary narratives, and they're not easy to disentangle. One concerns the aforementioned slow collapse of broadcast television, which is real: The ad revenue for all the late-night shows was $220 million in 2024, down from $439 million in 2018. The other is the president's (considerably speedier) mission to silence, persecute, harass or punish his critics.
Neither narrative, however, bodes well for late night.
Late-night TV has always been rather pleasantly cursed with a veneer of built-in obsolescence. There he is, that guy in the suit. Jimmy Fallon still delivers his monologues in front of a billowy curtain. Everyone has a desk. The aesthetics are mostly familiar, unchallenging and strikingly dated. For as long as it's been around, these shows' hosts (and executives) have been trying to uncover a formula that successfully marries cool-kid disruption with mainstream appeal. Sometimes it worked. More often, competing shows characterized themselves as the cool kids and their competitors (or predecessors) as stodgy and outdated. For instance: There's a tendency to credit David Letterman and Conan O'Brien, gifted comics both, with "revolutionizing" late night by messing with the format's respectable frame. And sure, they pushed boundaries.
But every account of a late-night show, including theirs, takes not-quite justified shots at the versions that existed before - which tend to get characterized as stodgy and overproduced by comparison. Before Letterman started "The Late Show," he hosted "Late Night," which aired after "The Tonight Show" and therefore had fewer viewers and more freedom. It was celebrated for being looser and refreshingly experimental. "Not to make too much of it, but it was like Brecht," Randy Cohen, who worked on "Late Night," told Brian Abrams, author of "And Now … An Oral History of ‘Late Night With David Letterman.'" "Dave wanted you to see the ropes. Carson didn't want you to see the ropes. This isn't a value judgment. It's just two different aesthetics."
But late night, which admittedly feels, vibewise, like the guy who looked 48 when he was 22 and still looks 48 at 70 - was also, paradoxically, pretty squirrelly and weird from the start. Steve Allen did a bunch of zany stuff when "Tonight" started in September 1954 (including getting dunked in a giant vat of Jell-O!). And sure, Letterman sniped at his own network's parent company, but Jack Paar, who famously (and briefly) quit his own show mid-broadcast in 1960, was mocking censors and lampooning television's sometimes slavish approach to commercial sponsors long before him.
Put differently, late night has always offered Americans safe, expected, sanitized rebellion. It's relaxing. It's inconsequential. The genre's magic was always that something might happen but probably wouldn't. You might get to see the guy in the suit (metaphorically, in most cases) break out of it. Maybe he'll get pooped on by a small marmoset. Or get lucky throwing a tomahawk. Or quit. But most of the time, the "great show we have for you tonight" is not so much great as it is pleasantly forgettable. The nights and then the years slide by with these folks narrating them for us.
I've focused here on the men in suits because they're the only ones left. While Netflix has renewed David Letterman's "My Next Guest Needs No Introduction" for two more seasons (no word on "Everybody's Live With John Mulaney"), the streamer has cut the cord on a slough of productions including Hasan Minhaj's "Patriot Act," "The Break With Michelle Wolf" and Chelsea Handler's "Chelsea." TBS canceled "Full Frontal With Samantha Bee," Hulu canceled "I Love You, America With Sarah Silverman," Comedy Central canceled "The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore," and Facebook Watch discontinued Jada Pinkett-Smith's "Red Table Talk." Other casualties include Robin Thede's BET show "The Rundown," "The Amber Ruffin Show" on Peacock and NBC's "A Little Late With Lilly Singh."
The withering of late night is not, in other words, new. TBS reduced the length of Conan O'Brien's talk show, "Conan," to a half-hour in 2019 before the show ended in 2021. CBS canceled "The Late Late Show" in 2023, when James Corden - who succeeded Craig Ferguson - left the network. CBS also canceled "After Midnight," its "Late Late Show" successor, after comic Taylor Tomlinson decided to leave earlier this year.
"The Tonight Show" and "Late Night With Seth Meyers" on NBC and ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" have managed to hang on in an increasingly hostile and competitive multiplatform media environment. They survived the rise of smartphones, the Youtube-ization of comedy into shareable clips and the onslaught of social media, which (in its infancy, anyway) gave users the kind of thrilling unfiltered access to celebrities that late night couldn't deliver. They survived the pandemic and Twitter and friendly, talented, supercharged, Emmy-gobbling usurpers like "Last Week Tonight With John Oliver." They've even survived TikTok and Jon Stewart's return to "The Daily Show."
But the format is labor-intensive, expensive and slow compared to platforms like YouTube. The interviews are too formal and scripted to compete with freewheeling celebrity-on-celebrity podcasts like "WTF With Marc Maron," "Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend," Amy Poehler's "Good Hang" and "SmartLess" with Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett. Many of the viewers advertisers most value have decamped from broadcast television to streaming.
And the pivot to political commentary, largely spearheaded by Meyers and Colbert, gave the shows some urgency (and virality, via YouTube). Colbert's ratings started taking off once he started getting really political. It wasn't a universally admired move; former "Tonight Show" host Jay Leno inveighed against the influx of politics in late night just this month in an interview with the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. "I like to think people come to a comedy show to get away from the pressures of life," he said. "I don't understand why you would alienate one particular group?" But there was a reason, as Leno himself pointed out back in 2017. Fallon, his successor, who at that point was still refraining from doing much political humor, was suddenly (and surprisingly) losing viewers to Colbert. "We live in an era now where if you don't take sides, both sides hate you," Leno said then.
Even the late-night shows' adaptability during the pandemic might have backfired: Once you've broadcast from your home (or indeed, your bathtub) - offering viewers that unprecedented level of access and intimacy - can you really go back to your studio and stage and suit and makeup and pretend that nothing's changed?
Reasonable points all, but they might also - at this particular juncture - be moot. Not just because of the cancellation of Colbert's show, but because the president has gleefully refused to go along with Paramount Global's statement that the cancellation was "purely a financial decision" and unrelated to Colbert's content. Rather than refute the appearance of impropriety, Trump has encouraged the impression that he had something to do with it - and has threatened that other hosts and networks and comedians might be (and should be) next.
A brief rehash: Paramount Global canceled Colbert's show, which routinely skewered Donald Trump, the same week the show was nominated for an Emmy, shortly after Colbert criticized the company's $16 million payment to Trump to settle a lawsuit as a "big fat bribe." The timing was curious, especially since Colbert was number one in the ratings.
It may or may not be a coincidence that Paramount paid the president millions and fired Colbert during the very month it was seeking the Trump administration's approval for an $8 billion merger with Skydance, a company owned by David Ellison and financially backed by his father, Trump pal and Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison. Skydance, for its part, promised to launch a "comprehensive view" of CBS, eliminate "DEI" at the network and hire an ombudsman "who will receive and evaluate any complaints of bias or other concerns" in the news division.
Trump's administration approved the Paramount merger with Skydance on July 24.
Trump didn't settle for celebrating the cancellation of Colbert's show on social media; he has made it clear that he hoped he was responsible, and that he'd like Fallon and Kimmel to be fired next. "It's really good to see them go," he posted, "and I hope I played a major part in it!" On Saturday, he suggested that ABC and NBC should lose their licenses for being arms of the "Democrat Party." These aren't really veiled threats. The message seems clear: Fire the Jimmies. Your licenses might go. The "or" linking those two statements seems implied.
Trump has tried this before. But when he tried to pull the networks' licenses in 2017, his then-FCC chair, Ajit Pai, refused to cooperate. "I believe in the First Amendment," Pai said then. "The FCC under my leadership will stand for the First Amendment, and under the law the FCC does not have the authority to revoke a license of a broadcast station based on the content of a particular newscast."
This time, things are different. Trump has the full support of his current FCC chair, Brendan Carr. Asked about the Skydance merger, Carr chose to emphasize rather than downplay or deny the president's involvement in the deal. "President Trump is fundamentally reshaping the media landscape, and the way he's doing that is, when he ran for election, he ran directly at these legacy broadcast media outlets, ABC, NBC, CBS," he said on CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." The reasons he listed for approving the merger included assurances from Skydance that they were "going to reorient to getting rid of bias" and "invidious forms of DEI and discrimination. At the end of the day, that's what made the difference for us in terms of our review at the agency." Asked whether this constituted a violation of the first amendment, Carr said, "I think it's time for a change."
It's easy to dismiss late night as old-fashioned pabulum. But the franchise has a long history of comedians being righteously difficult. They only look like respectable guys in suits, and maybe that has value at a moment when corporations seem hell-bent on appeasement. Unlike CBS, Comedy Central (which also belongs to Paramount Global) is doubling down in the face of intimidation, even though it clearly goes against their own interests. On "The Daily Show," Jon Stewart ended a segment on Colbert's firing with a gospel choir chanting "Go f--- yourself" at any institution that might censor itself preemptively to avoid angering the government. As exits go, a bang beats a whimper. If late night ends, at least it'll go out raging against the dying of the light.
(COMMENT, BELOW)