There's a bigger story behind Colbert's cancellation

Vox

5 days ago

is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.
On Thursday, CBS announced that it was going to cancel The Late Show With Stephen Colbert after Colbert's contract ends in May 2026. The news comes at a politically fraught moment for CBS and its parent company, Paramount Global. It's also the capper on the long arc of late-night political comedy, a genre Colbert was instrumental in building and which now, finally, appears to be on its last legs.
In a statement, CBS said its decision to end The Late Show — which began with David Letterman as host in 1993 — was 'purely financial.'
'We are proud that Stephen called CBS home,' the CBS statement said. 'This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show's performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.'
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That last line, that The Late Show's cancellation has nothing to do with 'other matters happening at Paramount,' seems directly aimed at tamping down speculation about CBS and Paramount Global's political motivations for cancelling a decades-long fixture of network television.
Paramount Global is currently attempting to merge with Skydance Media, and company leadership has been acting as though they are concerned that President Donald Trump might try to block the merger. Earlier this month, CBS and 60 minutes announced a $16 million settlement in its lawsuit with Trump over the editing of a segment about former Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris — an extraordinary concession for a media company in a case that experts agree CBS would have likely won in court. The longtime executive producer of 60 Minutes also resigned earlier this year, citing threats to his journalistic independence.
Days before the cancellation, Colbert said on his show, 'I am offended' by the settlement. 'I don't know if anything — anything — will repair my trust in this company. But, just taking a stab at it, I'd say $16 million would help,' he quipped. The payout, he added, was a 'big fat bribe.'
Colbert's ousting feels symbolic, not just of CBS's apparent decision to bow down to Trump, but of the end of late-night political comedy as a genre.
Two days later, reports say, CBS told Colbert they were canceling his show.
The network's stated reason for canceling the show has the sheen of believability. It's true that the late-night ecosystem is struggling. Still, Colbert's show has consistently led the ratings for its time slot. CBS and Paramount Global, The Atlantic contended on Thursday, no longer deserve the benefit of the doubt.
On Truth Social, Trump — a frequent target of Colbert's jokes — is celebrating.
'I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,' Trump posted Friday morning. 'His talent was even less than his ratings.'
Colbert's ousting feels symbolic, not just of CBS's apparent decision to bow down to Trump, but of the end of late-night political comedy as a genre. Sure, John Oliver's Last Week Tonight continues gamely on HBO, but the kind of late-night show that felt urgent and necessary 20 years ago — the stalwart outraged host cracking wise about the foibles of the corrupt federal government and the credulous media ecosystem that enabled it — has been fading for a long time. Now, its moment is coming to a close.
Jon Stewart and the rise of political comedy
The late-night political comedy show as we know it was developed and perfected by The Daily Show under Jon Stewart over the course of the 2000 presidential election. As the question of whether Al Gore or George W. Bush had won the electoral college wended its way through the Supreme Court, The Daily Show took on a central role: Stewart and his colleagues, including Colbert, were the TV personalities best equipped to talk about how fundamentally weird and confusing the whole thing was.
After Bush emerged victorious, The Daily Show became even more crucial. Their skill set was uniquely suited to the Bush years. While the administration took on a pious pose of compassionate conservatism, it was lying to the American people and embroiling the country in an endless foreign war. Stewart and his cohorts knew how to call Bush out on their hypocrisy and be funny about it, too. They were young and edgy, making one of the most exciting shows on television. It felt as if they were telling the truth in a time when no one else was.
Stewart always insisted that he wasn't a real journalist and The Daily Show wasn't a real news show. Nonetheless, a 2007 poll from the Pew Research Center found Stewart tied for fourth place in a list of America's most trusted journalists, along with Brian Williams, Tom Brokaw, Dan Rather, and Anderson Cooper. For lots of liberals, especially young ones, Stewart absolutely was a journalist, and so were the comedians he elevated.
In 2005, Colbert developed his own Daily Show spin-off, The Colbert Report. Even more biting than The Daily Show, The Colbert Report saw the host playing a parodic version of Bill O'Reilly, then the biggest star on Fox News. Like O'Reilly, Colbert's character was pompous and swaggering, lapping up his audience's applause and pontificating on 'truthiness' and the American dream. In 2006, he headlined the White House Correspondent's Dinner in character and ripped into Bush directly to his face, in a moment that Vanity Fair would say turned Colbert into a 'folk hero for the left.'
With The Colbert Report an accepted institution, Colbert and Stewart developed a double act. They held a 2010 Rally to Restore Fear and/or Sanity, with Stewart pleading for sanity and Colbert for fear. In retrospect, those years would represent the zenith of their popularity.
Colbert was the first Stewart acolyte to get a Daily Show spin-off, but his wouldn't be the last. John Oliver got his own show in 2014. Samantha Bee got hers in 2015. Hasan Minhaj got his in 2018. The 2010s saw The Daily Show model of news-focused political comedy spread across the landscape of television, no longer a scrappy upstart, but an institution, what we understood as what late-night television was supposed to look like.
They couldn't critique hidebound media institutions for failing to do their jobs anymore, because now they were media institutions.
There were two big problems with all that success. The first was that the Bush years were over. In 2008, Barack Obama became president, and while his administration had plenty of foibles for liberal comics to skewer, the central joke of the hypocrisy of neoconservatism was no longer available to them. The urgency of their comedy, the sense that they were meeting a moment as no one else could, began to fade away.
The second problem was that success meant that The Daily Show brand of comedy was no longer punching exclusively up. They couldn't critique hidebound media institutions for failing to do their jobs anymore, because now they were media institutions. What else could it mean when, in 2015, Colbert took over The Late Show and became the face of CBS's late-night lineup?
How late-night television lost its bite
When Trump won the presidential election in 2016, part of the received wisdom was that this would be great for comedy. Trump, after all, was a joke. He would offer all those Daily Show graduates plenty of fodder for their routines.
Instead, liberal comedy faltered. The skill set they had developed for the Bush years, the ripping away of pious lies to reveal the violent truth below, had no particular effect on a figure as shameless and straightforward as Trump.
One by one, the shows of the Daily Show alums began to topple. Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj went in 2020. Full Frontal With Samantha Bee left in 2022. On The Daily Show itself, hosted from 2015 to 2022 by Trevor Noah, ratings toppled.
Colbert dropped his character to host The Late Show, but he criticized Trump often and vociferously as himself. All the same, his work didn't feel particularly biting or urgent anymore. Young people, particularly young men, were more likely to find right-wing comedy to be edgy and transgressive.
Yet somehow, with a president this thin-skinned, and a corporate leadership this obsequious, Stephen Colbert has been rendered threatening once again.
'If something was the height of fashion 20 years ago, that almost inversely makes it less likely to seem hip and cool at the moment,' the media critic Matt Sienkiewicz told me in 2022. 'There's a rebelliousness in the way people think of this right-wing comedy, right? Even if it really is regressive and pointing back to old dominant ideas. But it can be branded as being the opposite of Stephen Colbert crying about January 6 during his monologue, which is very much not cool to the teens.'
That's part of what's so striking about Paramount's decision to cancel Colbert's show in an apparent attempt to curry favor with Trump: Colbert's work hasn't felt dangerous in a long time. We're a long way from that 2006 White House Correspondent's Dinner, when Colbert delivered his jokes to a tense and scandalized crowd and Bush walked away furious. Colbert is the definition of a mainstream comedian now, and it doesn't seem as though anyone has any illusions that the jokes he cracks in between celebrity glad-handing and crowd work are culturally fundamental.