CBS' Colbert Axe and Late-Night's Slow Death

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5 days ago

Late night hosts are just like us: They vent in group texts too.
So it is that CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert, NBC Tonight Show host Jimmy Fallon, Late Night host Seth Meyers, ABC host Jimmy Kimmel and HBO Last Week Tonight host John Oliver 'commiserate' in a group text, stemming from their strike-era podcast Strike Force Five.
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'It's helpful for us to cross-pollinate the information we're hearing from the people in charge of our networks to make sure it's all checking out with everybody else, and also just to commiserate, because everybody who's doing this, to some degree, obviously remembers a time where things were a little more flush,' said Meyers on the Good One podcast last month. When pressed whether we are in the end of the era of late night TV, Meyers said 'there's always a chance something turns around and all of a sudden it's on the upswing again, but I certainly would bet on there being fewer [late night shows] in the future.'
Of course, not even Meyers could have foreseen how quickly the dominoes would fall. The cancellation of the most-watched show in late night TV, Colbert's Late Show, stunned the TV world Thursday, as well as CBS staff. It is a 'painful time' a source says, while another insider describes the staff being understandably 'stunned and devastated.'
Even Colbert was surprised. He found out about the decision after Wednesday's taping, and rather than wait to disclose the decision to viewers, opted to reveal it himself a day later, fearing an inevitable leak of the cancellation. 'I share your feeling,' Colbert said, as the crowd in the Ed Sullivan Theater booed after he broke the news.
One knowledgable source tells The Hollywood Reporter that they did not believe any of the network late night shows were meaningfully profitable any more, though some deals can be justified by leveraging the hosts in other ways as 'company men' (Kimmel, Meyers and Fallon, for example, appear at events like the upfronts, and Kimmel and Fallon have produced and hosted other shows for their parent companies over the years). The Late Show was also harmed by the fact that Paramount couldn't license it or sell it international markets.
The same source predicts that Paramount will put the iconic Ed Sullivan Theater at Broadway between 53rd and 54th street on the market in conjunction with the end of the Late Show, noting that the company has already sold off its Radford and Studio City lots in Los Angeles, and the CBS corporate headquarters building in New York. That will likely be a decision for Skydance leaders David Ellison and Jeff Shell, however.
Late night used to command attention from insomniacs, college students and marketers looking to reach an audience that was traditionally younger than primetime. But those days are long gone, and a time where a host had an eight-figure annual contract to host a daily show in a midtown Manhattan theater with 400 seats and a staff that topped 100 seems like a relic of a bygone era.
Colbert's contract was set to end after the coming season, perhaps explaining the timing for the decision, as negotiations for a renewal would have begun in earnest soon. As for the rest of the network late-night landscape, ABC's Jimmy Kimmel Live! will begin the final season of its current three-year deal in the fall. NBC late-night hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers signed deals last year to continue hosting The Tonight Show and Late Night through 2028, though whether the shows survive in their current iterations until then is less certain today than it was just a few years ago.
The youthful audience that once flocked to late night now spends most of their time on social-first video platforms, where a new generation of talent is emerging. And while many of the late night shows have found a meaningful audience on platforms like YouTube by creating original content or repackaging their TV segments, the revenue from those digital sources can't offset the lost dollars from linear TV.
'I think the biggest reach for all of these shows now clearly is — you can call whatever you want — it's YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, social. That's where these shows get reach, and that's where they have their power,' says Gavin Purcell, the former showrunner of NBC's Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. 'On networks, it's just trickier now, the economics are different.'
NBC's Tonight Show is the most popular of the programs on social platforms, with 32.7M YouTube subscribers and 19.2M Instagram followers, followed by Kimmel with 20.7M YouTube subscribers and 4.3M Instagram followers, and The Late Show with 10M on YouTube and 3.7M on Instagram.
In terms of linear TV ratings, all of the late night shows are a shadow of their peaks, according to Nielsen data for live +7 and original episodes only: Colbert: 2.47M viewers; Kimmel: 1.75M; Fallon: 1.25M; Meyers: 949K; After Midnight: 652K; and Nightline: 827K.
But the ratings don't tell the whole story. According to the media measurement firm iSpot, brands have spent an estimated $32.2 million on advertising on the Late Show this year, while spend on Kimmel and Fallon's shows topped $50 million each. Both ABC and NBC sell packages around their late night shows that are inclusive of digital channels.
Either way, it's hard to shake the feeling that the late night talk show format is simply dying a slow death.
Former late night hosts have found success elsewhere (Trevor Noah and Conan O'Brien both have significant followings for the interview-driven podcasts), while efforts in streaming have not pierced the popular culture in the same way, even if Netflix's David Letterman series and John Mulaney's experimental talk shows suggest they are trying. One thing is sure: Colbert will have options when he does cede the desk, even if it may not be on 'late night.'
Purcell, who now hosts a podcast called AI For Humans on YouTube and other digital platforms, suggests that the future of late night talk shows, and perhaps a viable future for Colbert personally, is embracing the reach of digital media, and creating something new at a smaller, more sustainable scale. The economic model of YouTube has improved to the point where it can sustain a real business. Maybe not one of the scale or scope of the CBS Late Show, but certainly something that rhymes with it, as Hot Ones, Good Mythical Morning and Chicken Shop Date show.
'My big thesis here is that what you're seeing is the slow destruction of the traditional Hollywood pipeline, and you're going to see a lot less big shots, and a lot more individuals taking a shot,' Purcell says. 'Distribution is easy now. That's the thing that's really interesting. What's hard is attention. And the thing that Colbert and that team still do a great job of is commanding attention.'
Rick Porter and Tony Maglio contributed to this report.
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