Nate Silver: Why Colbert Got Canceled

Nate Silver’s take on why Colbert got canceled is interesting, in part because he was part of the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert circle of reliable experts for quite a few years. He notes he appeared on The Daily Show seven times, plus three more appearances on The Colbert Report. He knew these guys to some degree at least in the sense of what they could offer a guy trying to sell books.

So why is Colbert getting canceled? He acknowledges there are at least three views on that. Progressives think it’s because of Trump. Conservatives think it’s because of a lack of humor and CBS claims it was because the show was losing money every year. 

Of these three, Silver winds up dismissing the first most directly. On the politics angle, he says a little evidence would be nice:

…especially if progressives see themselves as being the more evidence-driven political tribe, it would be nice to see some proof that this was the reason for CBS’s decision. Headlines in liberal publications boldly assert that the firing must have been driven by politics and then only acknowledge several paragraphs later that they’re speculating. Even MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, an unabashed progressive but someone who’s usually sober-minded, raised the stakes by asserting that it was “not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country’s leader on TV without repurcussions4.”

But if this was about politics, why would they let Colbert hang around and become the new center of resistance politics for another 10 months. It doesn’t make much sense. If the idea was to ingratiate themselves with Trump, the next 10 months of “Go F- Yourself” monologues probably won’t accomplish that.

As for the losing money take, he finds that believable but also points out that the amount involved isn’t actually game changing for CBS.

…until recently, CBS executives might not have been motivated to scrutinize the budget since the show was making money. But The Late Show’s ad revenues reportedly plunged from $121 million in 2018 to $70 million last year amidst declining ratings: about 2.1 million per episode in June, down from 3.1 million at the peak, less than 200K of whom were “in the demo”, meaning the 18-to-49 years olds that advertisers covet…

To Paramount Global, The Late Show is still just a rounding error: Paramount recorded $29 billion in revenues last year.

So his theory is that as long as Colbert was making money the suits could tolerate a political stink, but once he wasn’t making money that same stink became a burden.

I think it’s quite possible that CBS executives didn’t think they’re making this decision to placate Trump or for other nakedly political reasons. But if Harris had been elected instead of Trump, their decision might have been different; the show would perhaps at least have been given an opportunity to cut costs before the hammer came down. You might be able to survive losing money, and you might be able to survive being a political headache for the suits, but probably not both at once.

But the best part of his take is really about the third explanation, i.e. that Colbert wasn’t funny anymore. And on this point, he mostly agrees with conservatives, albeit in a roundabout way. He says center-left comedy just doesn’t exist anymore. Instead we have woke cancel culture.

…the late-night hosts aren’t in an easy position. Even in a post-woke era, poking fun at liberal shibboleths can still trigger an outraged reaction from critics and, perhaps more importantly, largely younger and more progressive staffers. And comedy usually isn’t very good when you have to tiptoe around people’s sensitivities.

On June 14, 2021, Colbert returned to taping before a live audience after a 15-month remote hiatus during the pandemic. The guest of honor was his mentor, Stewart. The subject, naturally enough, was COVID, and within a couple of minutes, Stewart twisted a rhetorical dagger. “I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has in many ways helped ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science,” he said, referring to the lab-leak theory. Colbert ably played along, taking a dramatic gulp of whatever beverage was in his coffee mug, but Stewart pressed on. “How did this happen? They’re like, oooh, a pangolin kissed a turtle?”.

Predictably, Stewart got beaten up by the left for suggesting the lab leak might be true, or at least wasn’t obviously false. Silver argues that this one appearance and the backlash that followed may explain why Stewart’s next show, The Problem with Jon Stewart, was such a dog (it was canceled after 2 seasons).

That show was aiming for more substance, but it was also unabashedly woke, with the voice of his presumably progressive staff writers coming through more than his own.

The bottom line, for Silver, is that woke scolding isn’t very funny. So you get shows that get a lot of applause from a liberal audience but not ones that get actual laughter from a cross-section of the country. That was Stewart’s problem and to some degree it was Colbert’s problem as well. 

Colbert’s material these days generates approval from censorious leftists but not much else. CBS won’t admit it but that’s probably part of the reason his show is going away. There’s no upside on the horizon. An ever-shrinking audience of anti-Trumpers will keep watching but that’s not enough to make the economics work.

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