• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, Yesterday

So now we know the end date of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” on CBS -- Thursday, May 21. 

Colbert, 61, made the announcement during the taping of Monday’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers” on NBC, where Colbert was a guest (photo above). 

The airdate is a mere detail in the big story that broke last July that CBS was giving “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” the heave-ho, but at the same time, allowing it to continue for one more season. 

We are now in the middle of that season, with less than four months to go until Colbert says good-bye.

So, what’s the significance of Colbert leaving and CBS quitting late-night TV?

One school of thought might be: Who cares? The answer to that might be: not that many people.

Sometimes it is easy to forget that for all the headlines and attention garnered by the likes of Colbert and Kimmel, their shows are watched by the tiniest fraction of Americans -- in the mid-2 millions for live viewing the last time I checked, out of an estimated U.S. population of nearly 350 million.

It is true that millions experience the late-night shows via other media such as YouTube where they watch bits and segments.

But even with that additional viewership, do the travails of these shows rise to the level of national importance? In one respect, they do.

Last year’s big late-night stories -- the Colbert cancellation and the Kimmel suspension -- did raise questions about the role that pressure from Trump may have played in both of them.

The president’s meddling in the antics of late-night TV comedians is certainly something that to most people is inappropriate and unprecedented. 

Having said all that, the weekday late-night shows are increasingly meaningless.

They are simply not the viewing habit they once were in the era of Carson, and then the era of Leno vs. Letterman. TV was a lot simpler then.

Either a new generation of Americans has decided to hit the hay earlier than their antecedents or today’s late-night shows are not giving them much of a reason to stay awake in the first place.