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The End of Colbert’s Late Show Is the End of All Late Night. Plus: Eric Bana, Anson Mount, Emma Stone, Pedro Pascal, Cam, Zac Farro, and More…

Dear Wags,

Around the turn of the century, we went to the Ed Sullivan Theater for a taping of The Late Show with David Letterman. We were advised to bring a sweater in the stifling heat of a New York summer, as Dave kept his studio as cold as a meat locker. We remember the banter with Paul Shaffer, but the guests? A blur. Did we catch Drew Barrymore, Elvis Costello, or Regis Philbin? Surely we would’ve remembered if the sparkling Teri Garr had been on the roster. Was all this before or after Dave’s angioplasty? Hard to say. Still, we remember the thrill of being a tiny part of something central to the entertainment world—to be invited to the big show, to sit in the dark while the cool kids cracked jokes.

But there was also the strangeness of it: how something that seemed so expansive on a small television screen could, in person, be so cramped—a shrunken play on a chilly stage, starring small people who could never live up to their projected selves.

The cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is yet another marker in the slow death of a unifying popular culture. The sorts of people who once filled late-night couches now host podcasts, where they natter on about the golden age of late-night itself. The shows have become mills for YouTube clips; vanishingly few Americans still stay up late to watch them in their designated format. Do you know any of these evaporating viewers? We can’t name a single one.

Harsh politics have crowded out gentler entertainments, and a splintered audience can’t hold together for more than a few seconds without descending into bitter argument. The glossy, tightly produced network talk show—as a genial venue where celebrities pretend to be reassuringly regular people for the amusement of the punters—is unsustainable.

We are all familiar with this autopsy. Colbert consistently led his time slot, pulling in around 2 million viewers nightly and reliably racking up Emmy nominations. CBS says the show lost $40 million annually, and that the decision to kill it was “purely financial, given a challenging backdrop in late night.” That was never going to wash in a hyper-partisan, conspiratorial age. “CBS canceled Colbert’s show just three days after Colbert called out CBS owner Paramount for its $16 million settlement with Trump—a deal that looks like bribery,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.”

More than one thing can be true, of course. As legacy media companies decline, they are notoriously vulnerable to pressure, and the Trump team knows how to work a vise. But this is also an old, troubling math problem. Colbert’s liberal politics may be out of sync with a venal, frightened C-suite, but that was equally true when he was drawing nearly 4 million nightly viewers back in 2018. If everything else has changed, the cost of producing a late-night network show remains extravagantly high. To underwrite such juggernauts—with their big bands, stables of Ivy League writers, and handsomely compensated hosts—you need the huge, vibrant, and reliable audiences of another era.

Late night itself is the product of media upheaval. The Late Show launched in 1993 as a vehicle for Letterman, after NBC passed him over for The Tonight Show in favor of Jay Leno. Letterman represented a generational shift—from Johnny Carson’s Middle American charm to something more ironic, detached, and absurd. That Gen X sensibility later found another avatar in Conan O’Brien, who was also famously denied The Tonight Show (proof that lousy executive decisions are perennial in network television). By 1999, Jon Stewart stepped into the chair on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, pioneering a new cocktail of satire and political commentary in response to 24/7 cable news.

Colbert, of course, is an alumnus of The Daily Show, which—alongside Saturday Night Live—had an outsized influence on late-night’s evolution. By the 2010s, especially during and after the first Trump presidency, the talk show monologue became a full-throated political statement. In an escalation of the culture war, Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah, and Samantha Bee became blue-state editorialists. Fallon—who inherited Carson’s old chair at The Tonight Show—was pilloried for ruffling Trump’s hair during a 2016 appearance. Alongside The Late Late Show’s James Corden, he leaned into viral sketch formats and musical bits, though even they folded topical critique into the mix.

Politics has been a reliable feature of American comedy since at least the 1960s, and it’s no surprise that those politics have typically leaned vaguely left. But the transformation of the information ecosystem has upended the old showbiz paradigm, pulling late-night toward the rhythms of cable news—and then into the algorithmic churn of the digital-social economy. If cable is dying, its ethos has been supercharged: tribalism over consensus, agitation over amusement. The business imperatives of a national network once favored a broad, unsexy middle. But in an age of infinite choice, viewers have abandoned the center for bespoke content silos and ideologically simpatico hosts.

Fox’s Gutfeld!—a stripped-down cable rebuke to network liberalism—now leads all late-night shows, drawing 3.3 million viewers and posting wins among 18- to 49-year-olds (or at least the dwindling handful inclined to spend evenings watching Fox News). But its success may be less a sign of ideological realignment than of a shrinking appetite for the form itself. The left-leaning slice of the audience is overserved; the right-leaning audience is validated with a single destination, though the broader conservative news-and-entertainment complex is vast. Even the winners are feeding off a diminished ecosystem—one that no longer supports the scale, surprise, or mass appeal that late-night once promised.

Nothing illustrates this better than a trip back to the late 1970s, when Carson was averaging 17.5 million viewers—roughly eight times what Colbert draws today. Carson’s farewell broadcast, in 1992, was watched by 60 million people. Absorb the fact that Fallon’s iteration of The Tonight Show cobbles together a little over a million viewers a night, and shudder at the enormity of old media’s collapse.

Carson, now dimly remembered, viewed sharing his politics as a “real danger,” fearing it would pigeonhole him as an entertainer and alienate part of his vast audience. He was socially liberal on abortion, race, and Vietnam, but projected a reassuringly conservative persona—an amiable (in public, anyway) heartlander who steered clear of polarizing monologues. He joked gently about Johnson and Nixon, Carter and Reagan, during times that were at least as politically fraught as our own. It would be a mistake to attribute his success solely to neutrality. The incentives—in show business and beyond—were simply different.

Carson’s dominance was enabled by what we now glibly call a platform—vast in reach, often insipid, and regularly infuriating in its blandness. Its scale inhibited edginess but also demolished silos. Intellectuals chafed at its corny homogenization of culture; not a few right-wingers felt stifled by its constraints. And yet, on YouTube of all places, it’s possible to glimpse what was lost. In old clips of Carson, Dick Cavett, and Dinah Shore, there’s a gentler American patter—one that hardly lacks for intelligence or wit. The humor is rarely galvanizing, but it is infinitely more generous.

There are still funny and fascinating people in the world to talk to. Presumably, Colbert—like so many entertainment refugees—will carve out his own corner of the new media landscape: a looser-format podcast, a video channel, a Substack, or some hybrid empire that rolls them all together. But there is no longer a commons. Late-night television was one venue where the nation communed with itself. Times and their diversions change. Now we go to bed doomscrolling for bad news about different enemies. The content may be more provocative. But we don’t sleep so easy.

Yours Ever,

Diana Christensen

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Something Wild

Untamed (Netflix). Good news: Cuts to the National Park Service haven’t affected the budget for super special investigators we didn’t even know they had! Meet Kyle Turner (Eric Bana), a weathered, bourbon-swilling tough guy who heads into Yosemite’s backcountry on horseback to investigate the fatal plunge of a young woman from El Capitan. Some things, however, aren’t so mysterious:

1. It wasn’t an accident.

2. Kyle is difficult, haunted by his past, and brilliant at his job.

3. His partner (Lily Santiago) is a former L.A. beat cop—and a tenderfoot in the wild.

4. Sam Neill plays the gruff superior who backs his star investigator, even though he doesn’t play by the book—though really, does anyone even bother with the book?

Plot-wise, we’ve ridden this trail before. But the cast is terrific, and the views of the Sierras are nothing short of stunning. Saddle up.

— Will Penny