Colbert’s Final Sign-Off Is Lesson in Late Night’s Self-Immolation

When Stephen Colbert signs off from the Ed Sullivan Theater for the last time on May 21, he will not simply be ending a television program. He will be closing a franchise launched by David Letterman in 1993, one that drew 23 million viewers to its debut broadcast and defined what American nights sounded like for more than three decades.What CBS has chosen to put in its place says everything about where the genre now stands: two back-to-back half-hour episodes of “Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen.” This syndicated comedy block has been quietly filling the dead air after Mr. Colbert’s show for months, at a fraction of the cost of a late-night flagship production. No search for a new host. No reinvention. No heir. Just an unceremonious handoff to cheaper programming and a quiet admission that the math no longer works.CBS called the cancellation, announced last July, “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” and declined to attribute it to the show’s content or ratings performance. Mr. Colbert had led the 11:35 p.m. hour for nine consecutive seasons.Yet the network pulled the plug anyway. Puck News reported the show was losing more than $40 million a year, a figure subsequently confirmed by the Wall Street Journal, though Mr. Colbert publicly called the number “beyond nonsensical,” arguing it counted only advertising revenue and excluded affiliate fees. “CBS looked at the math and quietly closed the door on 33 years of television history. No search. No successor. No announcement that they were even trying,” the founder and chairman of the public relations firm 5WPR, Ronn Torossian, told The New York Sun. “That tells you everything.”The audience walked out slowly, then all at onceAt his peak, “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” regularly attracted around five million viewers each night. By 2025, Mr. Colbert’s show averaged 2.5 million, while “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” had collapsed to 1.3 million. In the 18-to-49 demographic that advertisers prize most, combined late-night viewership fell 17 percent in 2025 alone, dropping from roughly 1.8 million to 1.5 million.The advertising market tracked the audience out the door. In 2018, advertisers spent $439 million on late-night television across the major broadcast networks. By 2024, that figure had fallen to approximately $220 million, according to ad-tracking firm Guideline. The costs, meanwhile, had not followed.Mr. Colbert commanded around $15 million a year, Mr. Fallon, around $16 million, with Mr. Kimmel not far behind. A “former late-night producer” told TheWrap that the shows had become “bloated,” with staff who joined early in their careers staying on for years as fixed costs. The economics of a format that had once been a reliable profit center for broadcast networks had quietly collapsed.Cord-cutting accelerated the damage. A professor of Communication at DePauw University, Jeff McCall, told the Sun that “late night TV is just not that relevant in today’s television world,” and the numbers back him up. Younger viewers were never going to sit through a 60-minute broadcast at 11:35 p.m. when they could pull up the three-minute clip on YouTube the next morning for free.The shows adapted to that reality by optimizing for virality over viewership. This, however, came with its own trap. Chasing clips meant chasing the news cycle, and chasing the news cycle meant politics.Politics over punchlinesThe genre’s pivot toward sustained political commentary began in earnest around 2016. Mr. Colbert, who had built “The Colbert Report” on satirizing conservative media, leaned hard into anti-Trump material after moving to CBS. Mr. Kimmel fought back tears on air after the 2024 election, his voice cracking mid-monologue. Mr. Meyers turned his “A Closer Look” segments into extended partisan dispatches. The instinct was understandable — the daily news was explosive and the audience that stayed rewarded outrage — yet the choice came with a cost that took years to register fully.A NewsBusters analysis found that 92 percent of political jokes on broadcast late-night shows in 2025 targeted conservatives, up from 82 percent the prior year. The guest lists were similarly skewed, featuring 197 liberal guests against just two conservatives across 818 episodes. The laughs came second to the lectures, frequently a distant second. The hosts had essentially chosen their congregation and then were surprised to find they were preaching to it only.In the aftermath of Mr. Colbert’s ouster, the debate is still being had about whether the hosts started catering toward niche programming or technology changed viewer behaviors.“The constant barrage and chorus that it’s a political leaning that has led to the audiences departing is a tidy tale, but simply not true,” the executive editor of Deadline Hollywood, Dominic Patten, told the Sun. “The audiences tend to be the same audiences they always were; there are just a lot fewer of them watching. What has changed is, in the words of Marshall McLuhan, it’s the medium, not the message.”“Late-night comedy shows brought on their revenue problems by abandoning the historic comedic approach and going full bore into political activism,” countered Mr. McCall. “The effect of the harsh political commentary, which was brazenly partisan, was to chase off moderates and right-leaning viewers who sensed they were not valued.”Mr. McCall’s contention is partly backed up by the emergence of an unlikely competitor. Fox News’s “Gutfeld!” averaged 3.336 million viewers in 2025, up 21 percent on the prior year, and was one of only two late-night-adjacent programs to post year-over-year growth in both total viewers and the adults 18-to-49 demographic. As recently as March, the show pulled in 3.53 million total viewers and 300,000 in the key demo — figures that continue to dwarf its counterparts. That is particularly striking given that “Gutfeld!” airs on cable, which reaches far fewer households than the broadcast networks carrying Mr. Colbert, Mr. Kimmel, and Mr. Fallon.Mr. Torossian called the show’s success the most important and underreported story in television.“A cable show, on a network that the entertainment press openly disdains, with a fraction of the booking power and promotional budget of NBC or CBS, and it’s the most-watched late-night program in America,” he said. “That doesn’t happen by accident. That happens because there is an enormous audience out there that still wants to laugh at the end of the night, and that audience felt completely abandoned by the people who used to serve it.”Mr. Patten is more skeptical of direct comparisons, noting that “Gutfeldt”’s success owes something to the traditional network logic of the lead-in.“What gets you to “Gutfeld!” is Hannity and Ingram and all the rest on Fox News, bringing a big audience right to his doorstep,” he said. “That is very different than what you see often on late-night television, where the predecessor to a late-night show is local news.”What CBS buried with the franchiseUnlike when Mr. Letterman stepped away in 2015 and CBS replaced him with Mr. Colbert, no new host is taking over. The franchise is simply being retired.“It’s not just the end of ‘The Late Show,’” Mr. Colbert told his audience when the news broke. “I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.”Starting May 22, “Comics Unleashed” moves into the flagship 11:35 p.m. position, with two back-to-back episodes each night. The switch requires almost no production investment from CBS. Mr. Allen’s company produces the program independently and sells it in syndication.What gets buried in the process is harder to quantify. For all its recent failings, the late-night format produced something that has no equivalent in the streaming landscape: a nightly shared cultural moment, nationally broadcast, reliably scheduled, capable of reaching audiences across demographics at the same time. More than 55 million people watched Johnny Carson’s farewell in 1992, according to NBC. That kind of simultaneity is gone, and nothing on any platform has replaced it, a loss that Mr. McCall contends will have reverberating impacts.“I think the era of reaching broad audiences is largely over,” he said. “That’s not necessarily a good thing for the nation. Common media and cultural experiences would be nice for our society. But audiences are now too splintered to ever find a large, undifferentiated audience anymore.”Mr. Torossian draws a more forlorn conclusion. “Network late-night had one job for 60 years: make Americans laugh before they go to sleep, regardless of how they voted. It stopped doing that job.”

Colbert’s Final Sign-Off Is Lesson in Late Night’s Self-Immolation

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