We’ve now had a whole weekend to mull over the bombshell announcement that CBS has canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, days to speculate abo
We’ve now had a whole weekend to mull over the bombshell announcement that CBS has canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, days to speculate about what exactly happened and what it might mean for the future of behind schedule night—and, y’know, the future of an independent media in America. Was the decision made because CBS’s parent company just chose to pay a palm-greasing $16 million settlement to the president as it seeks approval for a merger? Or did it really just come down to uncomplicated economics, as broadcast television withers and dies? At long last on Monday night, the titans of behind schedule night could finally weigh in at length.
Specifically, Colbert addressed the ordeal on his show, making airy of his impending unemployment—or, really, not so impending; he’s got ten months left. Colbert cited an alleged CBS insider who told news outlets that Late Show had lost between $40 and 50 million last year; Colbert wondered if maybe $16 million of that could be explained… somehow. Clearly Colbert did not, or perhaps could not, come right out and say that he thinks his axing was a demand made by Donald Trump, who celebrated the decision on Truth Social—but he certainly came close to the implication. Colbert then shifted gears into a segment about Trump’s metastasizing Jeffrey Epstein scandal, before bringing out lovable ancient dorks Lin Manuel Miranda and Weird Al to do a bit riffing on the recent Coldplay concert kiss-cam kerfuffle, featuring some celebrity guests. It was all perfectly fine, though one yearned for more righteous, indignant anger.
One of those celebrity guests was Colbert’s friend and former Daily Show boss Jon Stewart, who took a stronger approach to the news on his own show Monday night. Stewart made us wait for his reaction to Colbert’s firing, first launching into his own segment about Trump and Epstein, which laid bare the obvious lies told by the president in recent days (and, of course, forever). Eventually, though, he did get to the Colbert of it all. Stewart took pains to humbly acknowledge that he is under no delusion: he knows behind schedule night hosts are not really speaking truth to power, or doing anything more revolutionary than making jokes in the nighttime. But he does see something risky and infuriating in many immense institutions’ capitulation to Trump’s threats and demands. Stewart urged Paramount—which also owns the Daily Show’s network, Comedy Central—to “sack up” (ugh) and fight back.
He moved on to say that if the company doesn’t do that, fuck them. Stewart employed a gospel choir singing “go fuck yourself” to really drive home the message—tilting the segment into the realm of overly ornate Last Week Tonight stuntery. The intention might have been noble—to cause a ruckus in solidarity with Colbert, to test the tolerance of the corporate overlords—but it was nonetheless strained and awkward, a needless digression from Stewart’s particular rhetorical power.
What hampered both the Late Show and Daily Show segments was that we still do not know for certain what led to CBS’s decision, though we’ve plenty of circumstantial evidence to suggest it was something bad. Because no one could be definitive, their apoplexy had to be somewhat broad. There was anger at Trump, at gutless corporations, and even a little (from Stewart, anyway) at the audiences who have largely forsaken broadcast television. Both Stewart and Colbert were careful to downplay what they see as their role in the political ecosystem, but did want to highlight the significance of CBS’s suspicious decision-making. If Trump may be able to get the number-one-rated behind schedule night show canceled, what else can he do?
The answer is “a lot,” which is indeed frightening. But these shows must also face a more banal reality: behind schedule night is a struggling format, one that increasingly seems to be paying hosts expansive amounts of money to essentially produce YouTube clips that will earn a few hundred thousand views. The core audiences of these shows are, relatively speaking, rather miniature. The Daily Show’s reach and influence are massively dwindled; at this point, the show is really only speaking to its most dedicated acolytes. Maybe that was the joke last night, a choir preaching to its own choir. As galling as Trump’s suspected interference may be, such alleged meddling may have only hastened what was inevitable.
But one cause of erosion can’t really be separated from the other. Television ratings are falling because of the dominance of streaming content and social media, the latter of which has been one of the driving forces in the collapse of norms and the worsening of daily life. And social media has also had a massive political influence, swaying millions of people toward ideologies that favor Trump. Paramount has been battered for years by a shrinking audience, and now has been aggressed upon by one of the nastiest avatars of that cultural shift. So everything is all terribly connected, even if it turns out that Trump didn’t specifically ask CBS to yank the mic away from one of his most prominent critics.
In some ways, Stewart’s chorus might have been singing “fuck you” to the whole sorry state of things, to the pretty much universal complacency that let us all tumble down the hill into the greedy maws of tech and autocracy. Nice things—and Late Show is often one of them—disappear as a very few people scramble to make as much money as they can. It’s a very dire situation, and it’s likely only going to get worse. The Colbert cancellation may have been a targeted attack—and if so, shame on everyone involved. But it may only have succeeded because the show was already vulnerable. The bad guys have our fading cultural institutions right where they want them: frail and bleeding money and only really able to stand on principle. Which doesn’t seem to count for much these days.
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