Stephen Colbert assembles the Strike Force Five to make case for the future of late night

“Well, I would say that, I look at the figures. And the fact of the matter is that more people are watching late night television now than—and I know everybody gets crazy with Johnny Carson—obviously Johnny Carson had a lot of people watching one show. We have a lot of show with, like, 30,000 people watching each one, and it adds up. And people watch us on YouTube now and people have a lot of different options, and yet they still keep coming to us,” said Kimmel when asked about this by Colbert. “And I’ll tell you, when I got knocked off the air for a few days, people cancelled Disney+. Why aren’t you people cancelling Paramount+? Because you didn’t have it in the first place?” 

Kimmel was notably fired up during the segment (at one point asking why no one has asked Ryan Seacrest to make a case for the future of Wheel Of Fortune). Toward the end of the segment, he asked if they could touch on the “outrage that your show is getting taken off the air,” which the other hosts cheered but to which Colbert demurred. “I’m waiting for angry Stephen to come out,” he said. “I wanna see you go nuts!”  Says Fallon, “I think it’s odd the way it ended for you,” while Oliver cut in, “You’re talking in network television [that] ‘it’s odd, it’s a surprise.’ As someone from a different area of television, I can say it was some fresh bullshit.” Colbert, however, seems to still want to go out on a positive note. Check out the whole segment below.