What ‘The Late Show’ meant to America, to NYC, and to the Trump resistance
A late-night TV show is more than the sum of its parts. “The Late Show” certainly was.
First with David Letterman, then with Stephen Colbert, “The Late Show” was an amusing and comforting ritual for viewers; a treasured stage for comedians; a coveted platform for politicians and authors; and a reliable marketing vehicle for CBS.
The interviews made news. The monologues made sense of the news. The comedy bits made the whole world feel a little less bleak.
But now it’s all going away. CBS is closing the curtain on “The Late Show” on Thursday night. Citing broadcast TV’s financial woes, the network is giving up on an admittedly expensive late-night format and letting Colbert take his talents elsewhere.
Many critics see it as a form of capitulation to President Donald Trump, who has bristled at Colbert’s acerbic criticism and sought to silence him. Some “Late Show” fans believe Trump effectively canned Colbert and the show.
That theory is inescapable because Colbert was such a vocal part of the anti-Trump resistance, both in the late 2010s and again recently.
But an obituary for “The Late Show” focusing on Trump would miss what made the show special: It was about so much more than politics.
“The Late Show” was about Letterman’s top-ten lists, and stupid human tricks, and silly pranks at CBS’s expense. It was about Colbert’s unpredictable live shows and unusually incisive interviews. It was about viewers across the country teleporting to Manhattan’s Ed Sullivan Theater, spending an hour (unless they dozed off early) with a performer who felt like an old friend.
STREAMING NOW: “The Last Laugh: Stephen Colbert,” examining the legacy of one of America’s most influential satirists.
In a media environment of infinite choice and complexity, “The Late Show” was curated and consistent. People tuned in out of habit and loyalty, not because a clip surfaced in their social media feed, but because they’d been watching for years.
Judging from some of the viewer comments and emails I’ve read, the fans who are mourning the end of “The Late Show” are also mourning the end of shows like it — communal spaces that have been around for as long as they can remember.
“The Late Show” is not the only CBS institution reaching the end of the line this week. The network is also shutting down the CBS News Radio division at the end of this week, citing similar financial pressures, namely that the legacy division is unprofitable.
Colbert and his allies have noted that CBS didn’t try to salvage “The Late Show” by, say, dramatically cutting costs or changing the format.
But Colbert has mostly struck an amicable tone about the cancellation, calling the network a great partner and expressing gratitude for the years he had on the CBS stage.
Colbert, who taught Sunday school for years and is sometimes described as ministerial on air, has described his iteration of “The Late Show” as a show “about love,” even though he knew it sounded pretentious.
“When he was taking over for Letterman, he told me the kind of show he wanted to do was a show about people and about love and about being a friend to the regular people out there,” Jon Batiste, the show’s bandleader for seven years, told the Wall Street Journal in 2022.
Last year, while accepting the Emmy for best talk series, Colbert recounted the story about wanting the show to be about love, but said that “at a certain point, and you can guess what that point was, I realized that, in some ways, we were doing a late-night comedy show about loss.”
“And that’s related to love,” he said, “because sometimes you can only truly know how much you love something when you get a sense that you might be losing it.”
Colbert seemed to be describing how “The Late Show” evolved after Trump’s surprise victory in 2016.
He had taken the helm one year earlier, in the middle of the presidential primary season, and Jeb Bush and Bernie Sanders were among his first guests.
Colbert’s iteration of the show struggled at first, seemingly adrift without a clear identity, and the host, by his own account, found it hard to fill the much bigger stage he’d been given.
But the 2016 election night was a turning point. Colbert channeled liberal viewers’ shock, grief and dismay about Trump’s success. He said out loud what so many viewers wanted to say. And by early 2017, he began to beat “The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon” in the daily ratings race.
It was clear that Colbert’s audience — especially his fans who loved watching Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report” for years — wanted him to take on Trump.
Colbert sometimes minimized his political influence, saying he was just a clown, but both his supporters and detractors paid close attention to his commentary.
Right-wing activists decried Colbert and the late-night TV landscape more broadly, arguing the genre had become a nightly pile-on against Trump and his voters.
That’s why some online commenters are celebrating Colbert’s sign-off at the same time that others are gutted.
Colbert’s neighbors in midtown Manhattan, where the Ed Sullivan Theater is a tourist attraction on Broadway, are wondering what will become of the 100-year-old performance space.
For the time being, there are no firm plans. “The fact that nothing’s gonna come in here breaks my heart,” Colbert told Architectural Digest in a video tour of the theater. “But someone will figure it out, and I wish them all the luck in the world — because they’re gonna love it.”
There’s that word again: Love. It’s not a word commonly associated with late-night TV, but it’s true to Colbert and the spirit he brought to “The Late Show.”
In a farewell interview with People magazine, Colbert said of his longtime viewers, “I hope they laughed. I hope they felt better at the end of the day.”
“I mean, that’s it,” he said. “We’re there. We’re the last thing you see. A lot of things happen in a day, but we bat last, and so we get the last take that people hear before they go to bed, and I hope it made their day better.”
Knowing Colbert, he’ll try to do that one final time on Thursday night.