Late-night host Stephen Colbert, who’s left-wing, anti-Trump schtick finally wore thin enough with CBS to cause him to be canceled, is set to air his final episode on Thursday, but industry analysts think he may not be the last one to go.
CBS’s cancellation of “The Late Show,” which first premiered in 1993 with original host David Letterman, represents the latest reduction in the late-night TV landscape, a space that has leaned heavily to the left during the Trump era.
Other hosts are now expressing concerns that they, too, might soon join Colbert in what seems to be a collective farewell, The Hill reported.
“I think of Johnny Carson’s final week. I think of Jay Leno’s first week. I think of David Letterman, his last NBC week and his first CBS week,” Kliph Nesteroff, a standup comic and author of “The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels and the History of American Comedy,” told the outlet regarding Colbert’s last gasp.
“I think of all those monumental moments that have entered the canon of late-night history, and this sort of feels like it belongs with those,” he added.
“It feels like it has the magnitude of what late-night had in the 1990s, despite the fact that it’s coming about for a far more political and bizarre reason.”
Colbert’s swan song comes about 10 months after CBS stunned the entertainment world by announcing it would be pulling the plug on its late-night offering.
“This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late-night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount,” the network said then, The Hill noted.
Trump celebrated CBS giving Colbert the ouster, writing on his Truth Social platform, “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired.”
Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington, told The Hill that Colbert is among a generation of late-night comedians “who have become much more aggressive and critical in their mockery of politics.”
“We’ve been on a steady trajectory since the more evenhanded days of Johnny Carson towards a much more aggressive and more partisan vision of late-night humor,” Farnsworth said.
Along with Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel often criticizes Trump on his live ABC late-night show, and Seth Meyers frequently targets the commander in chief with jokes on “Late Night” on NBC.
But because the late-night fare on the broadcast networks was so left-wing and anti-Republican, that opened up an opportunity for Fox News host Greg Gutfeld, who got the opportunity to launch a late-night show called “Gutfeld!” in which he frequently rips Democrats.
“Being critical of President Trump has helped him with the size of his audience,” Farnsworth remarked about Colbert, but “it hasn’t helped him with the new conservative ownership of CBS.”
David Ellison, the CEO of Paramount Skydance, and his father, Larry Ellison, are both viewed as allies of the president.
“It’s important to remember that these shows are not designed to be fair, they’re designed to draw an audience,” Farnsworth added.
That may be true now, but in Carson’s day – and even in Leno’s day – the comedy was more politically even-handed because the goal was to draw in everyone, not just supporters of one party or the other.
And, as is evident with the cancellation of Colbert and, potentially, other lefty late-night hosts, the partisan business model isn’t sustainable anymore.
“Politics itself has become much more intensely critical and partisan over the last 30 years. The voters and the politicians themselves have moved in more polarized directions. The audience changes, the hosts need to change with it,” Farnsworth told The Hill.
Other analysts told the outlet that Colbert will be known for making late-night shows more political.