How Late It Was, How Late: Why the Stephen Colbert Firing Feels Personal to Boomers
"I absolutely love that Colbert got fired," wrote Guess Who.
A friend tells me that the good people of Evanston are upset about the firing of Stephen Colbert.
Evanston, which sits on the northern border of Chicago, is the home of Northwestern University, the alma mater of Colbert, the host of CBS’ “The Late Show,” which the network announced this week it will cancel next year.
Evanston is also where I was born, and like Colbert, I graduated from NU in 1986 (he was a transfer student; I never knew him but our paths must’ve crossed countless times). I interviewed him by phone once, right before he started “Colbert Report.” I’m a fan. The very night before his sacking was announced I laughed heartily watching one of his recent monologues. So the news of his CBS exit is of more than passing interest to me.
It is to a lot of people — the sudden announcement left many unmoored, with that feeling you have when a news event makes it feel like the world tipped slightly off its axis. Sure, it’s only an entertainment program. But “Late Show,” with its Trump-baiting monologues, rococo preambles to the “Meanwhile” news segments, lavish set in the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York — it felt like it was going to be around for awhile and grow old with the rest of us.
Now that won’t happen, and to a certain portion of the audience the CBS culling feels personal. The youngs largely won’t give a shit — watching a scheduled TV show on a broadcast network is for Mom and Dad, and Colbert’s show isn’t even as YouTube-snackable as Jimmy Kimmel’s or Jimmy Fallon’s. MAGA is exultant: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” President Trump shitposted on Truth Social. Because of course he did.
But for another type of person, this is a bell tolling in the churchyard. What kind of person? A white, college-educated, politically liberal person of a certain age, the kind of person who believes that government should solve problems and especially help the disadvantaged, that racial and gender parity are noble goals we should keep striving for, that literary fiction, public radio and alt music are among the highest expressions of humanity, that someone like Robin DiAngelo deserves a fair hearing no matter how fucking whack her ideas might be.
The kind of person, in short, who’s everywhere in Evanston, place of my nativity, former home of Stephen Colbert. The host of “Late Show” targeted his comedy at that type of person. Which is why Trumpers hate both host and his work so much.
Proving that liberals take no backseat when it comes to inventing conspiracies, they immediately had a theory about Colbert’s firing: He was disappeared because CBS is trying to get in good with the Trump administration. Three Democratic senators — Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Adam Schiff — thundered as much in their public statements.
This isn’t completely Q-Anon-level nuts, at least on the surface. Paramount, the hulking ruin of a parent company to CBS, has been trapped for months in a slow-motion car wreck of a merger/sale/whatever you want to call it, and it needs the deal to pass muster with the Trump administration. The network will pay $16 million to settle a ridiculous suit Trump filed over a “60 Minutes” report on Kamala Harris last year. So it’s not implausible they might have figured throwing Colbert’s ass on the bonfire would help their case, too.
But let’s stop for a second. First, consider that CBS isn’t replacing Colbert — they’re bagging “Late Show” entirely, just marching straight out of a time slot they’ve programmed and often led in the ratings for more than 30 years, since David Letterman moved over from NBC. What glorious, undeveloped pastureland it was then!
But have you seen broadcast TV lately? Primetime has become dime-time. What was once all slick sitcoms and glitzy dramas has collapsed, increasingly, alarmingly, into game shows and singing contests. Network execs, caretakers of crumbling plantations, can’t even summon the verve to develop some middling reality crap: Netflix hath stolen that, too.
In announcing the Colbert show’s demise, CBS said in a statement that “[t]his is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.” Fans were quick to scoff at that as alibi, pure and simple. Stephen has the No. 1 late-night show in viewers! This was about politics! Let’s drive these idolatrous money-changers from the temple of pop culture!
The sad truth, though, is that Colbert is tops in a dying medium: He occupies roughly the same terrain as the nation’s No. 1 blacksmith in 1905. “Late Show” loses about $40 million a year on roughly $100 million in expenses. It’s an expensive show, and it looks that way, every night. There’s no way to cut those expenses and keep the show resembling what is now. Cut Stephen’s reported $20 million salary? Drop in the bucket. Get rid of the live band? Same story. Trim the frequency to four nights a week, like Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show” already did? Ditto.
Network execs would be squeezing pennies out of budgets to lose dollars, because the trend lines all point to the extinction of broadcast TV as it has stood for the past 80 years.
And that is the heart of the matter. Colbert’s cancellation is a sign of the times, yes, but more than that, it’s a sign that carries to late Boomers such as myself the unmistakable whiff of death. Everything comes to an end, and that includes the media world we thought we knew since childhood, a world of “The Powers That Be” and all-powerful broadcast networks, of sober news anchors with perfect Mid-Atlantic accents, of three-camera sitcoms with explosive laugh tracks, of costly primetime dramas everyone watched, of late-night hosts who tucked you into bed with a twinkle of the eye and an 8-minute standup set.
I know, I know. It’s a lot easier to blame Trump than to admit your world is dying. But — good people of Evanston, and beyond — it’s going to die regardless.