APRÈS COLBERT, LE DELUGE: In his 1991 authorized biography of Woody Allen (which published about five minutes before Soon-Yi Previn became a household name), Eric Lax quoted Larry Gelbart, who adapted M*A*S*H into a TV series for CBS, and executive produced it for its first four seasons:
“A comedian is not your garden-variety-type person,” says Gelbart, who has written for nearly every major one in the past forty years.
*Given years of success and power, he’s going to get more and more bizarre. Jackie Gleason moved whole networks to other parts of the Union because he wanted to broadcast from there.” Gleason lived in Miami, from where many of his shows were broadcast. “They have more power than is really good for them and they don’t hesitate to use it.”
But Gleason could get away which such antics because his show was watched by 32 million people a week. Johnny Carson would move the Tonight Show from New York City to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, but what could NBC do? Carson simply was late night TV, as the New Yorker noted last year:
For thirty years, from October 1, 1962, to May 22, 1992, Johnny Carson presided over American popular culture from the 11:30 P.M. throne of “The Tonight Show.” At its peak, the show was regularly watched by seventeen million people. (The current late-night ratings winner, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” averages about 2.5 million viewers.)
Which is why, Ace of Spades writes, Colbert did his anti-Trump, anti-CBS freakout last week, only after CBS told him that they would be parting ways with him:
Paramount says the decision is “purely financial.”
Boy they’re not kidding.
CBS lost $40 million on Colbert’s show this year alone.
Sources inside CBS have suddenly become much more forthcoming about the sobering economics of late-night television in 2025–go figure– revealing that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has recently been running at an annual shortfall of $40 million.
If that sounds unthinkable for the #1 rated show at 11:35pm, consider this: as Matt Belloni reports today in Puck, back in 2018, all of late-night television combined generated $438 million in advertising revenue. By 2023, that number had been cut in half, and it has continued to fall.
Given that The Late Show–with its handsomely paid host and a staff of roughly 200 employees–reportedly costs CBS $100 million per year to produce, that $40 million figure becomes easier to understand.
Belloni also reports that CBS executives had been discussing the future of its Late Show franchise for months, and that Colbert’s team was informed around July Fourth that the show was in jeopardy.
Ah. As I suspected: Colbert “got brave” on July 7th and denounced his network only after the network told him they were cancelling his Regime “Comedy” propaganda hour.
(“Regime Comedy” was used by Ed Morrissey in his post.)
$40 million lost in a single year. And yet the left is OUTRAGED that one of their money-losing propagandists is losing his job.
Simpering fembots like Chris L. Hayes (an Allahpundit fave) are crying that firing their shareholder-value-destroying, no-advertisers-want-to-touch-them TV clowns means that Democracy Is Dying In Darkness.
Oh?
Skip to 5:00 if you want to see Stephen Colbert’s Regime “Comedy” in the past year.
Colbert tried to take a page out of the Smothers Brothers’ demise at CBS, and appear to go out as a brave truth teller, sticking it to the man, baby. In their 1986 book, Saturday Night: A Backstage History of Saturday Night Live, Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote:
[By 1968] The Smotherses became television’s symbol of dissent, and the power of their pulpit made them seem, to some, potentially galvanizing forces in that dissent; after the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago there were rumors they were being investigated by the FBI. Paranoia was fashionable then, and not always unjustified.
CBS canceled the Smothers Brothers in June of 1969, five months after Richard Nixon became President. The reason the network gave was that one of their shows had been turned in after the deadline stipulated in their contract, but Tommy Smothers, Mason Williams, Rob Reiner, and Steve Martin believe to this day the cancellation was politically motivated. “Nixon came in and we were off,” Smothers said. “We were thrown off the air because of our viewpoint on Vietnam.” They were also thrown off, Smothers adds, “because we had no ally in high places” at CBS. That was a key mistake that Lorne Michaels [creator of NBC’s Saturday Night Live], six years later, would not repeat.
Instead, Colbert was whiplashed by a combination of changing demographics and technology, while performing a show that would be far better suited to MSNBC or CNN than the successor to David Letterman’s 11:30 CBS show. (Colbert could likely land at either of those cable networks.) If Colbert thought he was a permanent television institution, no matter how hard to the left his show leaned, he wasn’t alone. Abe Greenwald’s Commentary newsletter today was titled “The Lost Liberal Dominion:”
PBS and NPR have been around for about 55 years, but it felt as if they’ve existed since the dawn of broadcasting. Whatever they once were, they now function as liberal messaging platforms. There are few good arguments for taxpayers footing the bill of any media organization, let alone those with aggressive political agendas. Congress has rightly voted to cut $1.1 billion from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Nationally, PBS and NPR get most of their funding from corporate sponsors and direct individual contributions. If their supporters can keep the lights on, good for them. If not, they will have demonstrated their superfluousness.
Stephen Colbert is hardly an institution. But this week, he serves as a good stand in for one: commercial media. Since 2015, Colbert hosted The Late Show, part of the glut of late-night talk-show leftism that arose in the Trump era. These are shows aimed at creating anti-Trump social media moments instead of delivering TV entertainment. And so, TV audiences became less than entertained. Puck News reports that The Late Show was losing CBS more than $40 million a year, so the network just pulled the plug. Meanwhile, the leader of the late-night pack is Fox News’ Gutfeld!, a lighthearted comedy show that, while right wing in nature, actually strives to be funny. The end of The Late Show will surely reverberate through TV Land with interesting consequences.
Liberals are learning that there’s no such thing as lifetime tenure, eternal cultural dominance, and unending access audiences or the levers of power. To be honest, many of us outside the liberal establishment are learning it too. I’d become half-resigned to the endurance of the liberal Pangea. But the ground is now shaking beneath everyone’s feet.
“#ResistanceMedia is going bankrupt. Regime Comms are being turned off, one by one. It’s all coming crashing down, and I couldn’t be happier,” Ace concludes.
UPDATE: If not CNN, MSNBC, or a podcast, Jim Treacher, with an assist from Grok, speculates another possible gig for Colbert next year: Has the Tide Turned Yet? Quite possibly.
