CBS has announced the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show.” They aren’t finding another host, the program is going to end. I never saw Colbert’s show–why would I want to?–but its demise is a landmark of sorts in talk TV history.
Colbert was on the air for ten years. He is an ardent liberal who never made any attempt to expand his audience beyond its left-wing base. Based on the clips and news stories I have seen, he was funny only if you think insulting conservatives is hilarious.
CBS was at pains to say that firing Colbert was “purely a financial decision.” His ratings actually weren’t bad, relatively speaking, but late night talk has cratered, in general, and ad revenues are down drastically from their former heights. Some liberals suggested that the firing was the nefarious work of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, which recently settled a lawsuit against the network brought by President Trump. But there is no reason to assume any political motive, and no reason to think CBS would voluntarily do anything that could be construed as pro-Trump.
The real context of Colbert’s demise is the continued decline of late night talk television. It has often been remarked that at one time, comics and talk show hosts sought the broadest possible audience. Johnny Carson was the prototype, and the most successful exemplar, of the host who was liked by just about everyone. Carson’s show was essentially apolitical. He made political jokes, but they were equally divided between the parties and he kept his own opinions to himself.
Colbert’s show, conversely, was about nothing but politics. It was aimed at the fraction of the population that can’t get enough leftism. In the end, that wasn’t a big enough audience to stay in business. In the larger picture, the political fracturing of late-night television talk is both a symptom and a cause of the cultural divide that has opened, in recent years, between left and right. It is too bad.
