The Killing of a Sacred Late Show
Two great posts yesterday about the Stephen Colbert cancellation situation – commentary from John Gruber and reporting from Matt Belloni. Gruber actually linked to Belloni's piece after his as a sort of counter-point to the notion that this entire situation was fishy. Which is a nice way of saying "political bullshit". Belloni's sources insist that the party line is true: that this wasn't political, but it was purely financial. (Though he seems skeptical of that as well.) As I said the other day, both things can obviously be true. Or, to quote the meme: why not both?
Look, let's just Occam's razor this shit. Late Night TV, despite The New York Times oddly covering it on a daily basis, is a dying dinosaur. It's not bad – though I'm not sure how qualified I actually am to say that, as I don't watch it aside from the occasional clip online – it's just a barnacle attached to a sinking ship that is linear TV. The numbers are sort of nuts in terms of decline. Gruber cites LateNighter for those:
All told, the Stephen Colbert-hosted show averaged 2.42 million viewers across 41 first-run episodes, comfortably outpacing ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! (1.77 million) and NBC’s The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon (1.19 million). In the advertiser-coveted 18–49 demo, however, Kimmel surged ahead with 220,000 viewers—his strongest performance in a year—edging out Colbert (219,000) and leaving Fallon (at 157,000) in a distant third.
First off, it's just nuts that The Tonight Show, which pioneered and long dominated the space thanks, of course, to Johnny Carson (while Jay Leno somehow mostly held serve versus David Letterman, whom Leno famously beat out/screwed over for his gig, before he famously screwed over Conan O'Brien), is not just in third place now – it's now half of Colbert's Late Show. Meanwhile, it's getting destroyed as well by Jimmy Kimmel Live, which I recall well as it launched around the time I lived in Los Angeles. And I had an apartment about a block away from where it was taped on Hollywood Boulevard. I would often walk down the street to get food and they literally could not give those tickets away. Not because it was bad, but because it was ABC trying to get into this race. For years, it was a slog, and now they're leaving The Tonight Show – The Tonight Show! – in a distant third.1 How does Jimmy Fallon still have that job?!2
Second, historical context, not just current context, matters. As Gruber notes:
For context, through the end of the 1990s and into the 2000s, Letterman and Leno each drew around 4–6 million viewers per night. Johnny Carson averaged over 10 million viewers per night in the 1970s and 80s.
Again, it's not that these shows are bad – though the clips I've seen of Fallon, beyond just the Trump hair tousle nonsense, are pretty lame – it's that the format and the medium are over. These should all be 30 minute shows on YouTube now. Which sounds pathetic, but it's not. It's just true!
With that in mind, obviously these shows are done, they just don't realize it yet. And that's in part because they're still key cogs in both the advertising and promotional space in the Hollywood systems. But if you're really losing tens of millions of dollars a year to produce these shows (which still seems up for some debate), you pull the plug at some point. But you also just would never expect the clear winner in the space to be the first to pull the plug!
But there again, context matters. CBS is owned by Paramount and Paramount is at the finish line of selling itself to Skydance. That deal, famously/infamously, has been dragged out as the Trump administration shook down 60 Minutes, which they ridiculously settled clearly in an effort to end the confrontation and get the deal done. And now the deal is on the verge of getting done but Trump is still going to be President for the next 3 years.3 With that in the back of your mind, occupying the exact same space as the knowledge that The Late Show will need to be put out of Late Night TV misery at some point soon-ish, why not kill two birds?...
But, as Belloni reports:
Nobody can know for sure. All I can tell you is what I’m hearing. Several sources at both CBS and Skydance insist the decision was based on economics, not politics. After all, if this was about appeasing Trump, they argue, Cheeks would have pulled Colbert off the air ASAP rather than giving him 10 more months in the chair. “Trust me, there’s no conspiracy,” a very good source close to Colbert told me tonight.
The "10 more months" element is an obviously silly strawman. It’s a move that would have been so explicit and outlandish that the backlash would have been insane. Why not practice subversion instead? This is not about what Colbert may or may not say on air, it's about sending a message. I'm not saying that CBS cancelled The Late Show because of Trump and/or broader politics. I'm suggesting that they may have done so right now because it's an extremely convenient time to do so given the likely optics boost they'd get with Team Trump – a message which, in fact, was received loud and clear, clearly. Yes, yes, there were contracts to renew or whatever. There always are.
Even if they really didn't want to announce it now, obviously the news would have found its way to Team Trump. And obviously he still would have interpreted it as a show of fealty. And obviously he would have leaked it. Or even just said it out loud in some random press conference. And so obviously Colbert was wise to get ahead of any of that and just rip the Band-Aid off as soon as he heard the news.
All of this said another way: why cancel the show in a year and get no benefit when you can do so now and get some goodwill from the current President? That's not a conspiracy, it's just logic for a company on the verge of a major merger.
1 The fact that Gutfeld! pulls more audience than any of these (albeit slightly earlier in the night) is... I don't know... at least as stupid as that whole schtick is?
2 I suppose it could be because no one is about to have that job!
3 Or maybe next 7 years. Or maybe 11 years. Or longer. Or a lot shorter! We'll see.