Late Night Is Dead on CBS and Trump Did Kill It…

…Just Not The Way The Democrats and the Left Are Going to Tell You

This week Stephen Colbert announced that next May, the Late Show With Stephen Colbert is coming to an end. More importantly — though I’m sure that part will be buried in the coverage to come — there’s no host coming to replace it. Starting in the fall of 2026, there will be no late night at 11:30 on CBS.

And that’s true for the entire night. Earlier this month At Midnight the replacement show that was put in after James Corden departed in the summer of 2023 was quietly cancelled. That decision would be an indicator of larger trends in television: that the audience on late night on the networks are now so low that they have become money-losers for the networks. This trend was already clear because of the growing decline in the number of submission in Late Night categories for the last several years, which have been shrinking in both Sketch Comedy and Unscripted year after year. In 2024, there were only four nominees in Late Night; this year, it was down to three. The bottom has been dropping out of the market for years and CBS is finally pulling the plug.

But none of this will be how it is read in certain circles. They will argue, because of the settlement that CBS made with the Trump administration that this is backroom deal to get rid of a man who has been a public critic of the administration on late night for ten years. It will no doubt be made as another sign of the Trump administration heading towards dictatorship which has been the drum beat of the left since, well, he ran for office ten years ago.

But let’s set the political aspect aside for a moment, at least directly and deal with an issue people in Hollywood never like to talk about: economics. I don’t know why but I think we need to remind people of something that everyone in television never wants to tell you: Hollywood is a business. It may be an entertainment industry but it is an industry and everyone who works on a television show is an employee.

Now to be fair, there is an entire industry that is created around it to argue that television is purely an art form with no connection to commerce. It’s possible the people who write this may actually believe this; the last vestiges of that illusion were lifted after the strike of 2023 for me and I suspect many others. And the industry has been becoming increasingly shaky for the last decade. There have been many outside factors; the fragmenting of the audience so that fewer people watch a show to make it be considered a success but still can lose money; the rise of streaming as a major service; the pandemic; the most recent strike but a subtler factor has been the way ever since Trump arrived on the scene, Hollywood has unofficially elected itself part of ‘the Resistance’.

I’ve written repeatedly that this has by and large failed given both of Trump’s electoral victories and the increasing label of the Democratic party as that of ‘coastal elites which has been hurting them with rural America. It’s also clearly been hurting Hollywood more and more across the board and nowhere more clearly in late night. For decades Johnny Carson, David Letterman and Jay Leon drew in millions in large part because their comedy made fun of all political parties equally, shifting every four years to the next party with no shifts. After Jay Leno left NBC in 2014, a new breed of late night has basically decided to spend its time fully assaulted all things Trump and the Republicans — not caring if they isolated half their audience, Perhaps they could have regained their audiences had after 2020 they assaulted the Biden Administration with the same ferocity they did Trump. Instead to a show, they basically gave Biden and the Democrats a pass or joked about them gently and kept assaulting Trump and Republicans with the same furor. Not coincidentally, numbers for late night and the number of late night shows overall have been shrinking and shows have been cancelled on cable and other services.

At no point as far as I am aware have Colbert or any of his counterparts either acknowledged the reality of their shrinking audiences or the fact that their material has constantly polarized viewers on party lines. If anything, the majority of them have been proud to be virulently anti-Trump and pro-Democrat and increasingly have doubled down on their rhetoric even after the most recent election. I wrote in an earlier piece that if late night dies:

(They) need to understand it wasn’t Trump that killed it off. (The) entire band of entertainers have spent the last decade waging a war against a man who they had more in common with then the majority of the people who voted for him. They didn’t have any real ammo to beat him with but they thought they did. So they used their shows as soapboxes isolated half the country, kept at it for more than a decade and now it is on the brink of collapse.

And what did they get? He still won. He won in 2016 despite their warnings. He won again in 2024. They’re still fighting against him. They still won’t acknowledge that he got the better of them. And they long since stopped trying to be entertaining or even funny doing so. They can’t understand how a guy who can’t take a joke is having the last laugh on them. What they never understood is that they were no funnier than he was and they never commanded anywhere near the audience he did.

Colbert is no different. He thinks his audience, both in the studio and watching at home, are ‘the real America’. That they only represent a portion of it — and not a particularly big one — is irrelevant to the conversation.

There’s an old joke about Ronald Reagan: “Everybody you know hates him. Everyone you don’t know loves him.” It’s usually told in liberal circles and you can basically apply to every Republican President since. To me, the lesson is that the liberal circle is a lot smaller than they’d like to admit. To them, it’s always meant: the smart people know the truth, it’s only the idiots who don’t get it.

For Colbert as well as so many of his brethren, the reverse has been true: “Everybody you know loves him. Everybody you don’t know hates him.” In liberal circles, particularly in the past decade, that’s always mattered a lot. But in the world of television where your audience is directly dependent on the number of people who watch, the number of people who love you is always important. And if the number of people who hate you choose not to watch, well, how long is a business supposed to operate on a loss?

Now I have no doubt that I will be deluged by hundreds of emails arguing that I’m demeaning Stephen Colbert by calling him ‘only an employee’. But in a very basic sense, he is. He gets paychecks from CBS. They’re larger then the ones you and I get — he’s closer to the one percent then he’ll tell you — but he does work for them. He is there to make a profit for his company. He was hired for that purpose, the same as anyone who works on any television show in any network or service.

Calling a television show a business product will no doubt draw howls from every writer, director and actor in the industry but last I checked you’re not doing it for free. In fact, you spend much of 2023 on strike because you wanted more profits. You’re part of a union as you reminded us. And you made it clear you work for corporations.

And at a most basic level bosses are entitled to fire employees who are unproductive. If corporations can and will do this to the rank and file (something I’m reminded of every time a corporation is excoriated by progressives for ‘downsizing’) they can do it for the executives. Late night has been operating at a loss for a while; Hacks actually made it part of the plot during its most recent season. Television chooses to cancel programs on a financial basis. This may sound cutthroat to their fans but that has always been how the business of television works and it always will be.

And on a side note, I’m having a very difficult time feeling anything resembling sympathy for Stephen Colbert. I watched his show on and off for the last five years and I haven’t found him funny in a while. He was hysterical on The Daily Show, wonderful on The Colbert Report and has been delightful as a writer and voiceover performers for years before and during that period. But his work on The Late Show was never up to his old material. He improved slightly when he became more political but that didn’t make him stand out against the field of Meyers or Oliver or Kimmel. He just became more shrill and lecturing then funny, more nasty and more isolating with his remarks. He’d had one running gag for ten years and it was the same one every late night comedian has had for ten years. And that joke’s appeal was always limited pretty much to the same people who always laughed at it.

Earlier this year I wrote “I think there is a strong possibility that late night television might die out not only in my lifetime but perhaps by the end of the decade.” Colbert’s cancellation — and more importantly CBS is just planning to stop programming there — is a sign of that larger truth. Perhaps the deal made with Paramount accelerated that cancellation but I have little doubt it would have happened eventually.

I suspect none of this will be heard by the talking heads at CNN or MSNBC. Hell, I expect the Democratic Party to use it as another talking point, if not a fundraising email in the near future. Why not? Trump has been the villain for so much on cable news and the left — much of it deserved — that it has been their default to blame him for everything even when he wasn’t in office. They inhabit a separate reality much like the one that Fox News and MAGA does and they are proud of it. They don’t realize that has always been part of the problem and that very much in the case of Colbert it was almost certainly a bigger factor than anything else.

And indeed with 24 hours of Colbert’s cancellation Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren have demanded a ‘Congressional Investigation’ into the real reasons for CBS doing so. Why shouldn’t they? Colbert has been a friendly audience to Democratic politicians on his couch ever since he took over the Late Show and essentially limiting his Republican guest to those who leave the party because of their positions against Trump. The Late Show is no more fair and balanced in that regard that Fox News is.

And in a narrow sense it’s worked out: Colbert has been a voice in the Democratic Party for years and Democratic politicians have a place to go where they can talk with none of the burdens of impartiality they would on cable news. The fact that it’s been a factor in hurting both late night and the Democratic Party — and for the exact same reason; it makes them seem out of touch with Middle America — has never seemed to be relevant to either group, despite that it has been a major factor in today’s political situation.

Even if there was a quid pro quo with CBS for the Trump settlement — which again, I can’t state for certainty — that’s not the reason the Democrats care. They care neither for Stephen Colbert or the death of late night as much as they do another anti-Trump talking point to make it seem like they are ‘doing something’. In large part Colbert’s audiences knows nothing about politics or how democracy should work and they don’t particular care. The only reason they’ve watched is because in their minds Colbert is ‘owning the cons’. That in an indirect way the industry he’s been a part of his whole life bears a responsibility in the division of this country as much as Trump is irrelevant to them. Colbert has always been speaking to his audience the same way MAGA does to its. The problem is all of late night’s audience has always been smaller than Trump’s — which again is the main reason his cancellation was inevitable.

The only reason I would favor an investigation would be if someone ended up talking to some actual Americans. The silent majority, the ones who’ve never watched late night, the Republican voter. They watch television too and they clearly hate Colbert. If the committee were to talk to some of them they might be able to understand not just why Colbert was cancelled, or why late night is suffering but a crucial part of the political divide that assails us. But I know that will never happen. Democrats officials are like Republican ones: they don’t want to look bad on camera with unpleasant facts. To use a phrase Colbert once coined, they have their own version of truthiness and it is unburdened by the facts.