Eleven years ago, Stephen Colbert was chosen to replace David Letterman as host of The Late Show, and as I noted at the time, he had ascended to the peak of a shrinking mountain. Network television was losing its grip on audiences, and the late-night talk show was no longer the ironclad institution it was when Johnny Carson spoke to all of America from behind a desk.
Last week, CBS canceled The Late Show, in a move virtually everyone acknowledges is retribution for Colbert using the phrase “big fat bribe” to describe the big fat bribe CBS’s parent company Paramount paid to the former host of NBC’s The Apprentice, so that the it could complete a merger between Paramount and Skydance. On the surface, this seems like bad news for Colbert. Shrinking or not, he was the king of the late-night mountain, with the top-rated show at 11:35 p.m. and near-universal critical acclaim. While Colbert’s Late Show never had the satirical bite of The Colbert Report, it certainly hit harder than the Jimmys. The show was more intellectual than the competition, but Colbert is a natural entertainer who excels at keeping things light, so even Late Night‘s forays into political satire felt breezy.
Which is all to say: Don’t worry about talented, well-loved Stephen Colbert. One could see him enjoying a post-late-night career similar to Conan O’Brien’s, or just as easily retiring contentedly to write an in-depth analysis of The Silmarillion. Stephen will be fine. CBS, on the other hand, will not. Network-television viewership has been in a long, steady decline since the day Netflix stopped being a company that sent DVDs through the mail. As of last year, CBS had a median viewing age of 67.8, the oldest in television. It can’t afford to alienate their remaining viewers, and just ask the NBC executives who fired O’Brien from The Tonight Show how much audience goodwill screwing over a beloved late-night host generates.
This might all blow over in time, as it did for NBC. Except abandoning late night and a presidential bribery scandal are just the beginning for CBS. Skydance, CBS’s prospective new owner, is run by right-wing media mogul David Ellison. His father, right-wing media mogul Larry Ellison, a close confidant and campaign donor to Donald Trump, contributed $6 billion to Skydance’s $8 billion acquisition of Paramount, which will make his son CEO of the merged company. Meanwhile, the younger Ellison is courting right-wing blogger Bari Weiss to join CBS News in some unknown capacity.
If firing Colbert is going to alienate some viewers, taking a hard right turn politically is going to alienate more. And as mentioned, CBS doesn’t have that many viewers to spare. For Bezos and Musk, tanking their media outlet or platform may have been a small price to pay to help get a president into power who shares their core belief that rich people shouldn’t pay taxes. Perhaps losing money on Paramount to promote right-wing ideas is worth it to Ellison as well. But you can only shred an institution’s credibility once. The Washington Post and X influenced the 2024 election; their shrinking audiences mean they’ll have less influence over the next one. CBS can suck up to Trump in the short term, but what does it matter if no one’s watching it in the long term?
Network television is dying and late-night talk shows with it. It’s an inevitable consequence of the streaming era, and the Ellisons of the world are only hastening their inevitable demise. For anyone who grew up in a time when series like Late Show and The Tonight Show (and newspapers like The Washington Post) were cultural touchstones, it’s tragic to watch those once-important institutions hijacked by selfish billionaires. But there’s some grim satisfaction in knowing that the ship they’ve hijacked has arguably already hit an iceberg.
