Stephen Colbert was too good for Paramount CBS

The end of Late Night is a shameful moment in history, but it's also a pivot point

Late night TV is all but dead, anyway, right? Colbert made it into the lifeboats before the ship went down.

Viewership of the three major network offerings is down 70-80 percent in the “money demo” (18-49) and 9 percent overall versus the peak year for the genre, 2015; the year Colbert took over The Late Show from David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon succeeded Jay Leno and Jimmy Kimmel moved to 11:35 p.m. That said, Colbert was the highest rated late night show and still brought in an audience north of 2.4 million every night; a number CNN would kill for.

In reality, the declines in viewership really only account for the very much dying medium of network (and cable) television. The realty is, most people who watched Colbert, and still catch Kimmel, Fallon and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, watch on YouTube or catch (and share) the clips on social media (well not the clips - since these geezer broadcast companies will ding any creator who posts their clips on a YouTube channel - as if sharing their content hurts them…) Or they subscribe to the app where John Oliver’s show runs. The real death of the genre has nothing to do with the talents of the hosts. It’s about the audience moving online (and the younger audience choosing streamers over everyone):

While traditional Nielsen ratings show a decline, late-night hosts are still finding audiences online. Kimmel has 20 million YouTube subscribers, and his three most recent videos each earned more than 3 million views. Fallon has over 32 million subscribers, Colbert just over 10 million and Seth Meyers around 5 million.

Even though TV ratings, especially for Fallon, have dropped significantly, engagement on YouTube tells a different story. These digital viewers don’t count toward Nielsen ratings, the industry standard for advertisers, but they show that fans are still watching — and interacting with — late-night content.

And not for nothing, but a genre in which all the stars are middle aged white guys might not be a growth industry in a modern, multicultural nation.

Still, for the Ellisons to unceremoniously end not just Colbert’s tenure on The Late Show, but to end the show altogether, is a sign. It’s a sign of the right wing billionaire stranglehold on our media — with the MAGA Zionist family in control of Paramount CBS and soon of Warner Bros and CNN, too, Jeff Bezos ruining the Washington Post, and the Murdochs controlling Fox, the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal. Between that and the rotten billionaire boys club that controls every social media app, we live in a MAGA hellscape that answers the question: what would happen if old time South African apartheid went global?

And the number of CBS employees who are now unemployed because a Zionist family and their MAGA claque wants to give a weak, whiny president who can’t take a joke comfort TV to watch as he drools himself to sleep in his gold-covered Barcalounger every night is both sad and infuriating.

Well they can go down with the Titanic. Never in their lives, if they live to be 110 years old apiece by draining kidnapped 18 year olds of their blood in a Peter Thiel-hosted coven ceremony will any of these rancid billionaires ever create anything as iconic as The Late Show; or really any late night, evening or dayside show ever created in history. Their tastes are too shallow, and their sycophancy breeds the opposite of creativity.

We’ll just be out here waiting for Colbert’s next thing so we can subscribe.

Thank you, Stephen

I had the privilege of appearing on Stephen’s show four times, and he and his team couldn’t have been kinder or more gracious. Colbert is the guy who in person is exactly who he is in your head. Just a lovely human being. And his entire team had that same easygoing, positive vibe. Here’s my appearance from when I was promoting my book Medgar and Myrlie:

Here’s my first appearance on the show — same girl, different wig!

This is from October 20, 2020 while we were in the midst of COVID lockdown.

My next appearance, and the first time we met in person was in July 20 2021:

Next up, my appearance on January 26, 2022 (and frankly, my best wig ever — thank you Koko and JaNece!)

And here’s my appearance on February 7, 2024 when I was in the midst of my Medgar and Myrlie book tour.

I’m quite sure this appearance helped get me to number one on the NYT best-sellers list, for which I’m eternally grateful to Stephen, and my friends at The View and the Tamron Hall Show, as well as everyone who had me on and supported the book.

But beyond the personal, I think it’s important to recall that Colbert has been, alongside people like Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Myers and others outside the very white, male confines of network late night — a brave voice of resistance against Trumpism and autocracy. And that voice will be missed. Silencing Stephen was clearly the Ellisons’ goal. But in this new world of independent media, silencing people isn’t so easy.

Good reads:

This throwback piece on the initial Colbert announcement is great, and not just because it also mentions me. And I love the title:

The Uppity Minority: Stephen Colbert and Joy Reid—Fired, Freed, and Unleashed

Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ ends with a swan song and a giant wormhole

NYT: Colbert’s exit marks the end of an era (gift link)

Colbert exited the way he entered: feisty

Colbert’s final show was, of course, epic, including this brilliant dig at his soon to be ex-bosses:

And yes… the band totally played the copyrighted Peanuts song!

In the finale of the final Late Show ever, Sir Paul McCartney joined the Colbert house band to play the show off with a proper New Orleans style funeral, to a NOLA version of The Beatles “Goodbye, Hello.”

And I rather enjoyed this ding at Bibi’s Bari:

And folks on social media called Trump… who issued his usual pissy post screaming about how low-talent Colbert is in the ultimate act of projection … on the carpet.

I’ll just leave it there. Thank you Stephen Colbert, and we’ll be out here watching! Oh an fam? This is not real or true. Maddow and I had a good laugh about it, though!

Facebook be lyin…

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