Extra: Lament for a Late-Night TV Host

Two days after Stephen Colbert announced the cancellation of his talk show, I still feel sickened by the news. I don’t always enjoy The Late Show, but I understand what its cancellation means for our country.

CBS claimed it decided to end The Late Show for financial reasons, which, as TV critic James Poniewozik pointed out, seems “truthy”– a term introduced by Colbert. While it may be true that CBS could not find a viable way forward for a show that cost $100 million a year to produce, it is perhaps truer that it needs the Trump administration’s approval to proceed with a pending corporate merger. Colbert has long been a sharp thorn in Trump’s side.

All of this made me reflect on the late-night talk genre.

In the eighties, I liked to stay up late and watch David Letterman’s original NBC show in real time. With recurring bits like “Stupid Pet Tricks” and “Top Ten Lists,” Letterman introduced irony and meta-humor to the genre, often making fun of its conventions. He also made fun of his corporate overlords at NBC and GE. No one cancelled him for it.

In 1992, I was visiting LA when Johnny Carson’s 30-year reign as host of The Tonight Show ended. It was a poignant affair, with Bette Midler singing "One for My Baby" to a teary-eyed Carson.

Perhaps it’s a sign of my age, but I used to be thrilled staying up to watch Madonna or Cher or Bette Midler make a special late-night appearance. It was one of the few ways you could see them, and it felt like an event.

But today’s late-night landscape is a wasteland for advertisers, who covet younger viewers. They consume media on streaming platforms and watch segments on YouTube or TikTok.

Which brings me back to Colbert—and Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, and any other smart, sharp satirist who ever dared criticize the orange menace on TV. Theirs are essential voices of dissent, decency—and yes, patriotism—in our new authoritarian reality.

In 2024, Trump stated that NBC/Comcast should “pay a BIG price” for Seth Meyers’ regular criticisms of him. Stewart has said he doesn’t know the future of The Daily Show.

We have ten more months of Colbert on The Late Show, unless he goes too far criticizing Trump. As I wrote in a letter to the editor of The Plain Dealer, I would expect CBS to pull the plug sooner if Colbert’s disparagements of Trump become too withering.

All of this was much bigger than the cancellation of a TV show or the muting of one voice.

As with so many things under Trump’s reign of terror, it is the very muting of free speech.

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