Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP
Stephen Colbert has been the national leader in late night for close to a decade.
It’s easier for a company to bow to the wishes of a would-be king if the request from said king will save your company money. In other words, the firing of Stephen Colbert and the dissolution of the Late Show franchise that has been CBS’s evening staple for more than three decades doesn’t have to be one thing or the other. It can be a craven capitulation to Donald Trump, as Paramount hopes he’ll wave through its proposed sale to Skydance. And it can be a recognition that late-night talk shows are no longer a viable property in the television business.
That’s definitely a theme of the Colbert coverage, whether you’re reading The Atlantic or The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times. But it’s so incomplete as to be unconvincing to liberals who are sure that this was about a mighty company succumbing to Trump’s intimidation. After all, the idea that nobody likes to watch talk shows anymore is belied by the fact that the fastest-growing media product in America consists of three-hour conversations with a guest, and people actually want to watch those conversations on video.
Yet the strongest evidence that Paramount’s sacking of Colbert was definitely but not solely a gift to Trump comes, ironically, from Colbert’s sharpest supporter, his former boss at The Daily Show Jon Stewart. On his podcast—keep that gig, Jon—the once-a-week TV host mused about the network on which he toils, Comedy Central. “Without ‘The Daily Show,’ Comedy Central’s kind of like Muzak at this point … I think we’re the only sort of life that exists on a current basis, other than ‘South Park.’”
If “late night” were all that was at risk, there would be more than two original programs on an entire television network, one of which was delayed until streaming rights were granted. The financial turbulence in Hollywood extends well beyond the narrow time slot between 11:30 p.m. and 1:30 a.m. on three broadcast networks. It’s about the rest of the schedule as well. Television as we have known it for more than 75 years in America affirmatively is going extinct, and practically nobody has reckoned with the implications of that.
Here’s an experiment: Spend an hour or so surfing back and forth among basic cable channels, and then tell me what year it is. As I wrote about last August, cable is a zombie wasteland, a set of ghost towns airing reruns, movies, reruns of movies, and reruns of reruns. Suites of cable networks have been bundled into spin-off corporations by Comcast and Warner Bros. Discovery as if they were parasitic, toxic assets that needed to be hived off before they infected and destroyed the host. These companies still make a lot of money, but that profit is collapsing as advertisers figure out that maybe viewers aren’t so keen on sitting through the 56th showing of The Office that evening.
While the old business model for televised entertainment is dead, the new business model doesn’t yet exist.
But cable isn’t the only issue. Of the top 68 highest-rated single programs on all television in 2024, broadcast or cable, 65 were sporting events; number 39 was the Sunday Night Football studio show during a weather delay in October. Only two scripted shows, CBS’s Tracker and Young Sheldon (which ended last year), made the top 100. Sports are the last thing keeping the broadcast/cable television apparatus alive, and the gradual movement of sports programming into streaming, most notably Amazon’s grab of a share of the NBA contract for next season, signals that will meet its end, too.
We are in the midst of this giant transition of television from networks into streaming channels that have no fixed lineup. Appointment viewing, other than live sports, is simply a thing of the past. Small armies of staffers that built the model of a television network, thinking hard about lead-ins and demographics and time slots, are no longer needed.
Late-night shows, with their topicality, aren’t all that rewatchable, and therefore are among the more difficult things to shift into a streaming library. And people aren’t interested in waiting up late for conversations they can catch on YouTube. Colbert has been the national leader in late night for close to a decade, though Gutfeld! on Fox News gets about 50 percent more viewers. (Whether they’re awake or just fell asleep during Laura Ingraham is another question.) But even talking about winners and losers in this category obscures the ratings reality. The CBS Late Movie, a rerun it aired against The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson in the 1970s and ’80s, had an audience in 1972 of nearly seven million adults per film, nearly three times as many viewers as Colbert’s “top-rated” Late Show a half-century later. The movie cost nothing but library rights. The Late Show costs $100 million a year.
So yes, late night is in free fall. But that reflects, rather than contrasts, the general free fall of all non-sports programming on linear TV. There were 105 million households with cable in 2010 and 68.7 million today, a 34.5 percent drop in a decade and a half at a time when households increased by 12.4 percent. Not even half of American homes subscribe to cable, satellite, or a virtual cable service like YouTube TV, and more people watched streaming content than broadcast and cable combined for the first time ever in May.
The Trump business gave Paramount an excuse internally to do something the conglomerates have resisted for a while but know they must eventually: begin the demolition of their linear television product. This may start in late night but it won’t end there, as before long—maybe a decade—everything moves into the streaming networks. Already, the investment has moved to streaming, including at studios like Comcast, Fox, Warner Bros., Disney, and Paramount, which are all contending with the unlimited pockets of Netflix, Amazon, and Apple.
The giant problem is that, while the old business model for televised entertainment is dead, the new business model doesn’t yet exist. Only Netflix is truly profitable; the other services reached profitability with large cutbacks in programming while also raising prices, something that will hit a limit. Netflix’s first-mover advantage has allowed it to grab content from around the world and make it new to other countries, saving money with library product instead of new shows. Bundling is perhaps a savior, essentially a reinvention of cable on streaming. But everyone in the space is rushing toward an uncertain proposition.
Just think about all the business models that hang on the old television model that will be wiped out once this transition is complete. Cable companies at some point will find it impossible to service a shrinking user base. The advertising model for products relies on television; it’s moving elsewhere, and it may get more targeted, but it’s coming to a medium where ads are easier to tune out. The advertising model for politics is even more reliant on linear TV, with its local targeting.
News itself looks like it’s going to be left behind entirely in the streaming transition. Local news may have to go back to antennas to survive if cable companies stop distributing the product and carriage on streaming is not guaranteed; how might this add to local news deserts? Will sports fan bases stay loyal when they need six different streaming services and thousands of dollars to watch their team play? Hollywood, an entire company town juiced on peak TV, has withered amid the dissolution of many of their outlets, left in a bad bargaining position with a few giants. The biggest and most popular U.S. manufacturing export—entertainment—doesn’t have a clear path to survival.
Maybe we’ll find answers to all of this as the transition continues. But it’s not being intelligently designed. The warhorses are soldiering on until they hit resistance, like Paramount did with Trump. And nobody, I mean nobody, in government is really thinking about this. The Federal Communications Commission is too busy grading broadband on a curve to think about the coming extinction of the main medium it oversees. Congress is similarly too busy dodging votes on the Epstein files. Everyone is hoping the free market solves the problem; it isn’t working out so far.
Lawmakers should investigate whether the end of The Late Show was part of, as Colbert called Paramount’s payout to Trump over a frivolous 60 Minutes lawsuit, “a big fat bribe.” But they shouldn’t end their investigation there of this disruption, and the fallout from it for key sectors of the economy, our culture, and even our democracy.
