This Thursday is the final day for the Late Show with Stephen Colbert and I’m glad the show is ending. I think a lot of people on the right feel that way. His nightly clapter material about Trump is pretty tired at this point. I don’t think anyone should miss that.
But the truth is that I don’t think Colbert was canceled because of his boring and repetitive opinions. I think he was canceled for the same reason The Washington Post and the LA Times have been laying off workers for the past couple years. Things have changed in the news and entertainment world and Colbert, who has spent years trying to combine the two, sits atop an approach to celebrity promotion that really hasn’t change much since the 1960s.
The basic concept is this. Have a group of 3-4 celebrities on each night to promote their latest film or album. The host tries to make the celebs look good and the celbs draw lots of eyeballs which allows the networks to charge big dollars for late night commercial ads that would otherwise be running cheap at midnight (if they ran that late at all).
That system worked for many decades until the internet came along and then YouTube and Instagram and eventually TikTok. Suddenly, celebs had a bunch of ways to communicate directly to their fans. They could promote their projects on a daily basis without having to get booked on someone’s show.
And most important of all, a bunch of new shows popped up that didn’t need a staff of dozens or hundreds of people to air. Conan O’Brien figured out what had change after he appeared on a show called The Hot Ones.
Former late-night talk show host Conan O’Brien saw the shift for himself after his 2024 appearance on “Hot Ones,” the YouTube talk show featuring celebrity guests eating progressively spicier chicken wings. His unhinged appearance went viral, racking up 10 million views on YouTube within months and generating tons of press.
“That was the moment the scales fell from my eyes,” O’Brien told The Hollywood Reporter earlier this year. “If a guy can do World Series numbers with overhead that looked, to me, to be about $600, and you have every big star lining up to do his show or Chicken Shop Date … that’s when I profoundly understood that late night shows are in trouble.”
He added: “I’m of the mind that yes, these shows are going away and will become something else.”
I don’t know what the actual budget for The Hot Ones is, but the show supposedly earns about $30 million a year in revenue. I think it’s safe to say almost all of that is profit.
By contrast, an episode of the Late Show costs (according to Google’s AI) between $500,000 and $700,000. Colbert alone makes something like $20 million per year. On top of that, the show has a staff of 200 people including the band, the writers, etc. Many of these people are also making big salaries. The total cost to produce a year of the show is around $100 million. But current ad rates haven’t supported that spending for a few years. So the Late Show is losing something like $40 million per year. Replacing it with a show that would be profitable from day one was a no brainer.
Starting Friday, CBS will be leasing its airtime to a show from media mogul Byron Allen, a former stand-up comedian who got his start writing alongside Letterman and Leno for Jimmie Walker and now owns 13 television stations, the Weather Channel and, soon, a majority stake in BuzzFeed.
In an interview, Allen wouldn’t disclose how much he is paying for the time slot but said it is in the tens of millions. He will make money off of the advertising he sells. The programming switch means “immediate profitability” for Paramount, a company executive said last month. “The Late Show,” which employs about 200 people, was reportedly losing millions a year.
As Allen puts it: “I can save you $40 million, pay you some, and I’ll put a show in there that’s been on the air for 20 years.”
Anyway, that’s why the show was canceled. But it’s not why I’m glad it was canceled. I’m glad because I think Colbert’s turn to political clapter instead of actual comedy was part of the bigger move toward woke scolding that a lot of actual comedians have complained about over the past decade. I’m not saying Colbert was the worst or only offender. He wasn’t. But he was certainly following the trend.
Comedians, decades ago, used to go on tours of colleges where they could really unleash some of the wilder material, certain that a bunch of edgy undergrads would love it and not take offense. But that’s not the case anymore. Now colleges have become safe spaces and comedians are afraid to tell a joke which will result in someone standing up to lecture them for being problematic, racist, sexist, etc.
Again, Colbert doesn’t own all of that but he surfed the trend. His “comedy” is the safest thing possible in the current world. It’s the same partisan jabs over and over every night making fun of the same handful of targets. At least that’s the impression I get from every time I’ve seen his show in clips. Maybe the guy is occasionally funny, I wouldn’t know. I just know that he decided to put politics front and center and comedy took a back seat to sending the right message. Here’s a sample from last week. Is any of this funny? Not really.
Longtime watchers of this show will know that I’m not usually critical of President Trump, and I take no pleasure from pointing out his rare mistakes or minor misstatements. But in the interest of balance, I will remind you the man got elected on the promise of bringing costs down. Well, the Iran war has pushed inflation to the highest rate in nearly three years. Welcome to Trump’s golden age.
That’s not my idea of entertainment and in two more days it won’t be anyone’s.
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