With the arrival of the new year, we are now in the
final months of traditional late-night TV on CBS as Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” makes its way to its finale in May.
When Colbert leaves, CBS
will exit the late-night talk-show arena after more than three decades, leaving only NBC and ABC with competing shows at 11:35 p.m. Eastern on weeknights.
So
what happened? Some say the demise of the liberal-leaning Colbert show stemmed from Paramount and Skydance’s battle for regulatory approval of their merger last year.
But in the end, the TV Blog believes the decision was made to shut down the show for the same reasons that TV shows have been canceled since time immemorial -- ratings (now known
more popularly as audience data) and money.
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The former supports the latter, and in the absence of growth for either of them, TV shows eventually bite the dust --
especially shows such as “The Late Show” that are expensive to produce.
So why didn’t the ratings advance? The TV Blog believes it
came down to showmanship.
When he came to CBS, Colbert promised that along with the usual A-list celebrities, his “Late Show” guests would include “intelligent,
interesting” people.
By this he meant guests who many viewers of late-night comedy shows might not be particularly familiar with -- such as political commentators, authors,
intellectuals, scholars and the like with whom Colbert would conduct “serious” interviews.
“Serious conversations? On a late-night comedy
show?” asked the TV Blog a few weeks before Colbert’s debut in 2015.
“While many casual observers of late-night TV bemoan the lack
of 'serious' or 'intelligent' conversations on the shows, experience shows that successful late-night shows are decidedly unserious, and for the most part, unintelligent. That’s not a criticism
-- just a fact,” the TV Blog opined.
To give the Colbert "Late Show" its due, the show has had a lot less of these guests from academia or TV
commentary than the cavalcade of movie and TV stars that are traditionally the bread and butter of late-night talk shows.
From the beginning, Colbert had
them all. But in between, he had the other cavalcade of "interesting" people that he promised.
Like all of the late-night talk shows of the last 10 years or
so, "The Late Show" is aimed at the left, not the right, thereby alienating half the country.
Conventional wisdom (at least
on the part of some) holds that alienating half the country by deriding the way they see the world is not a path to audience growth for a late-night TV show or any TV show for that matter.
But back to the subject at hand -- "Late Show" guests from the worlds of commentary and politics in the last two months or so have included Chris Hayes, Julia Ioffe, Andrew
Ross Sorkin, Evie Colbert, Jen Psaki, Rachel Maddow, Mikie Sherrill, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rep. Jim Clyburn.
These people have their fans and followings,
I suppose, but to many, they are just downers. Chris Hayes, Jen Psaki and Rachel Maddow, for example -- all from the former MSNBC (now MSNOW) -- are not exactly a barrel of laughs.
The sight of them must have caused mass tune-out by the thousands, if not millions.
But so what, right?
With Colbert leaving the scene, the era of Fallon-Kimmel-Colbert comes to a close. I wonder what the next era of late-night will look like?