The glory days were
already long past for late-night TV when CBS announced last week that it was pulling “The Late Show” after 33 years.
How do we define
“glory days”? Huge audiences, lots of money, hosts who became the biggest stars in show business and high-stakes drama that made headlines. Today, there is none of that.
The only headline story of any significance that we have seen in ages was last week’s story that “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” will end next May,
and so will the show.
The show will be “retired,” said the CBS announcement last Thursday.
Translation: “The Late Show” is
history, and so is CBS’s participation in the traditional late-night talk show fray.
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The network did not use the word canceled. Instead, the demise of
“The Late Show” was positioned as the “end of its historic run.”
The reason provided for the end of the show’s run was
surprising because press releases rarely, if ever, come right out and admit candidly that a decision on the life or death of a TV show is a financial one.
“This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” said the network, which also took pains to praise Colbert as “irreplaceable” and
one of the “greats that graced late night television.”
After asserting that the decision to terminate “The Late Show” was financial, the press release
then included a sentence meant to allay concerns that the end of the show had anything to do with its continual satirizing and spoofing of Donald Trump.
“It
is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at [parent company] Paramount,” said the sentence, which does the opposite of allaying such
concerns. Instead, it raises them.
“Other matters” likely refers to the other matter of CBS News and the lawsuit Paramount settled with Trump after he sued the
company for a tiny, insignificant edit in a “60 Minutes” story that he said amounted to election fraud.
When the news got out that the company settled the suit without fighting it so that it could move closer to finalizing its merger with Skydance Media, the settlement was widely
panned.
So now, the company wants everyone to know that no pressure was applied by Donald Trump to dump “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” even
though show’s stock-in-trade is satirizing and spoofing Trump nightly. Skeptics and conspiracy theorists are now free to think the opposite.
Whether or not Trump had
anything to do with the end of the Colbert show, late-night TV seems poised to fade away on its own.
CBS has seen the writing on the wall for a while. After James
Corden exited “The Late Late Show” in 2023, the network ended that show too after 28 years.
Filling the space was a cheapo viral video show
called “After Midnight” that lasted a year. It ended last month, and reruns of the show are still airing in the 12:25 a.m. Eastern time period.
CBS’s foray into late-night talk shows began in 1989, when Pat Sajak was recruited to host a nightly show at 11:30 p.m.
“The Pat Sajak Show” lasted a year and ended in 1990. “Late Show with David Letterman” came along in 1993 and ran for 22 years. When the show ends
next spring, Colbert will have been the host for 11 years.
The late-night hosts are aging. Colbert is 61. Stewart is 62. Jimmy Kimmel is 57. Jimmy Fallon is
the youngest of them at 50.
At the moment, Kimmel is the longest-running of the late-night hosts. He has been hosting “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” for 22
years.
When or if he decides to leave, will ABC continue the show with a new host and a new title? That seems doubtful.
In 1993,
CBS actually bought a whole building for the Letterman show -- The Ed Sullivan Theater, a landmark on Broadway.
Odds are it will be sold, just like CBS’s storied old headquarters building, the architectural landmark on Sixth Avenue known as Black Rock that Viacom sold in 2021.
And so, the story of late-night TV enters a new chapter. It may be long or short, but it feels like the third act
in a three-act play.