There’s a lot of kerfuffle over CBS/Paramount’s announcement of the impending cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s Late Night for “financial reasons”. I suspect there’s an element of truth to that. Consider the graph above, sampled from a piece by Tim Baysinger at Atrios. He attributes the decline to a transition to streaming:
Late-night TV is expensive — with the top hosts like Colbert and Jimmy Fallon making north of $15 million per year — and the social media age has dramatically changed how viewers watch them, choosing online clips the next morning over live viewing.
That was two years ago. The figures that I’ve seen suggest that Stephen Colbert’s program is losing $40 million per year at this point.
I don’t think it tells the whole story. Since it premiered in 2021, viewership of Greg Gutfeld’s late night program on Fox has grown from 1.69 million to 3 million viewers—that’s the opposite of other late night programs.
Starting with Steve Allen to Jack Paar to Johnny Carson to Jay Leno, late night comics have always been topical, at least occasionally but they haven’t been steadfastly partisan. That’s been different for the last ten years or so. Late night programming on ABC, CBS, and NBC has all been left-leaning.
I don’t expect The Late Show to be the last late night program to be cancelled. I expect we’ll see others fall by the wayside in coming years.
The questions I have for those who lament the departure of Stephen Colbert are:
- How many times have you watched Stephen Colbert in the last month? I suspect none.
- How long do you expect CBS/Paramount to carry programs that aren’t making money?
Late night has had a good run—more than 60 years. I’ve never been a regular viewer of late night television and haven’t watched it once since the Leno and Letterman days but I’m not the target demographic. I think it’s time for a change in late night television.
Wife and I were talking about this in the car this morning. Neither of us have watched any late night talk show in probably at least 30 years. It’s a format that went stale for us. We arent into celebrity culture and they mostly interview celebrities. Honestly, we dont know who most of the celebrities are at this point. We watched Colbert when he did his own show and liked him a lot but had no interest in the Late Show format.
Steve
I think these shows are probably doomed in the long run. I’m Gen-X and haven’t watched one in years and have no interest. And my kids barely know them from a few IG or YouTube clips. Some quick Googling tells me the median age for viewers of these shows is late 50’s.
Colbert’s show is the first for a couple of reasons IMO: He was pretty politically on the D side, so alienated half or more of his potential audience. He then took that too far by being the head of a show that was losing money by openly and politically criticizing his bosses.
That’s certainly my take, Andy. The key point is that you can be as topical and partisan as you like if you’re making money. Losing money is the mortal sin.
Update
Nate Silver just said the same thing as I did in my comment above at considerably greater length.