By Charles C. W. Cooke
Monday, July 21, 2025
CBS has killed The Late Show. It is
possible that, in so doing, it has killed the late show, too.
Since the news was promulgated, entertainment analysts
have been busy looking for the murder weapon. Some have suggested Donald Trump.
Others have pointed to the political climate, or the state of the TV market, or
the economics of producing a spectacle in contemporary New York City. My choice
is less complex. The executioner was Stephen Colbert.
As the host of the Late Show, Stephen Colbert was
annoying, in a direct and palpable sense. He hectored; he sneered; he gatekept
for a narrow, pious worldview; and, above all else, he sacrificed jocosity for
ideology — a trade that never, ever pays. Under Colbert’s inadequate leadership,
the program came to resemble the sort of bedeviled mutt that one might expect
if one were to instruct artificial intelligence to produce a chat show, having
trained it solely on old episodes of The View. Not only did the product
fail to look like America; its architects neither knew what America looked like
nor wanted to know what America looks like. It was insular, smug, and
self-serious — and, worst of all, it routinely committed the only mortal sin in
show business: It was boring.
Most of this was directly Colbert’s fault. The rest was
indirectly Colbert’s fault. Many of the postmortems have noted correctly that
Colbert was obsessed with a particular strand of American politics and that, in
addition to giving the show a dull, Manichean tone, this obsession led him to
offer up a surfeit of left-leaning politicians as his guests. What has received
less attention is that his non-political invitees were also habitually dreary.
Why? Because, in the environment that the Stephen Colberts of the world have
created, they had no choice but to be so. It is, indeed, true that the “death
of the movie star system” has made late shows more difficult to stage. But,
in the grand scheme of things, that is a red herring. A media universe that was
engineered by the likes of Stephen Colbert was always destined to be a media
universe in which interesting people sedulously avoided saying anything of
consequence, and in which those who tried to say compelling things were swiftly
cut off at the pass. Ultimately, the problem was of demand, not of supply.
I have often observed how peculiar it is that the two
most cramped and censorial industries in the United States — the media and the
universities — are the two that, by rights, one would expect to be the most
freewheeling. I shall offer that observation again here. Go back and watch some
of Johnny Carson’s interviews from the 1970s, and you will notice how generous
the man was in both style and substance. Into his studio came an eclectic
parade of guests and interlocutors, and, irrespective of their foibles,
eccentricities, or perspectives, Carson treated them all in the same affable
way. Night in and night out, he asked gentle, empathetic, open questions, and
then waited
calmly for the answers — even if those ended up being unusual or harrowing
or bizarre. Stephen Colbert did not do this, and, even if he had, the
atmosphere that he, his writers, and his audience combined to create would have
served as a ruthless prophylactic against spontaneity, candor, and good-natured
badinage. There is, I daresay, not a proficient PR agent anywhere in these
United States who would have willingly encouraged his client to go on the
Colbert-hosted Late Show and “be himself.” The show had rules, and it
had an agenda, and everyone implicitly understood what both of those were. In
Johnny Carson’s day, the guests were the stars, and he was the facilitator. In
Stephen Colbert’s, the guests were the facilitators, and he was the star. Which
one of those do you think makes long-term viewing easier?
In the New York Post, Johnny Oleksinski submits that
Colbert was as much a bystander as a cause of the Late Show’s failure,
and that the more general takeaway from its impending demise ought to be that
“network late-night TV is dead.” There is something to this view: Cable and
streaming have segmented the market; the internet has atomized us in ways that
were not true three decades ago; and the sheer number of entertainment products
at our disposal has relegated television from the dominant medium to one of
many. But I am not entirely sold on this line. Blockbuster movies were in
trouble until, in a stroke of great perspicacity and foresight, Hollywood made one that people actually liked. The presidency was
“too big for one man” until Ronald Reagan came along and, unlike his hapless
predecessor, actually proved adept at performing the role. All too often,
predictions of imminent demise are contravened by figures who refuse to accept
the inevitability of the way things currently are, and so it could be here,
too. As it was in the 1970s and 1980s, the United States is a big, bustling,
fascinating place, full of diverse, innovative, captivating people. The first
late-show host to break with the present trend, and to embrace that country and
its citizenry on its own terms, might well find that there are more things in
heaven and earth than have been dreamt of by our current crop of craven,
constrained, constipated arbiters of taste.
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