CANCELING COLBERT BEGINS THE END OF TELEVISION:

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.

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.

The technology of television — viewing moving images electronically in the home or on a portable device — will be around in some format forever. But other than sports, the idea of live (or live to tape) destination viewing is largely, if not entirely, dead and gone.