The end of The Late Show, an American institution since 1993, leaves those still surviving within the format wondering what the future looks like. In a way, it is a shock every time the biggest talk show hosts assemble into their Strike Force Five, the podcast-born group consisting of Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver. The real repeated surprise is the realization that there are or were five major late-night hosts still standing.
Even before Colbert got the axe, it was actually four: Oliver hails from a weekly perch on HBO, which seems likely to last for many seasons. But still, four big-name network talk shows in this economy? Strike that down to three, now that Colbert's tenure is officially over, and his David Letterman-founded late-night franchise with it. Though Colbert is the exact wrong one to cull – the group's best interviewer, strongest comedy bona fides, and highest-rated show to boot – it is hard to argue that network TV is in need of the late-night chat shows that used to be such a major status symbol and cash cow. Though the shows are notoriously expensive, they must have once generated substantial revenue.
The Changing Landscape
Today the landscape is becoming both more and less competitive; fewer actual late-night shows, their numbers decreasing because a lot of people can watch any number of things at whatever time works best for them. NBC's Saturday Night Live has managed to remain relevant by providing stuff that other late-night shows do not. It offers a comedy focus that doesn't pull punches in quite the same way as a talk show forced to rely on current events; a sketch-variety format and expanded running time; and the event status of actually broadcasting live.
But it is sort of the exception that proves the rule: every time there is talk of SNL head honcho Lorne Michaels retiring, someone at the network will salivate about how much more profitable the show could be with budget tweaks. As untouchable as it seems, it cannot be considered fully exempt from the overall warning issued on Colbert's finale: “At some point, this may come for all our shows,” the Strike Force Five mused about the sucking CG void symbolizing his cancellation.
Are We Losing the Recipes?
Are we losing the recipes by letting these network standbys drop out of sight? On one hand, there have been plenty of stretches of TV history where not every major network carried a talk show. As such, some retreat may only be a natural after-effect of the decades-ago late-night boom. On the other, it has been the shows and hosts more prone to format-breaking that have been earlier to go, such as Craig Ferguson's freewheeling version of the Late Late Show or Conan O'Brien's quirkier iteration of The Tonight Show. The sorta-game show After Midnight died as soon as host Taylor Tomlinson wanted to move on. With so few options, traditionalism reigns.
The real shame is that the CBS slot is not up for grabs: not for a new Late Show host, which Colbert has publicly wished for, and not even for a new CBS show trying out something else in late night. Byron Allen has made a time buy for the Late Show time slot, meaning he will pay CBS for the airtime, into which he will plug his longtime, low-budget hackfest Comics Unleashed, a formerly syndicated showcase for low-wattage comedians.
A Genuinely Retro Move
Maybe you have to hand it to CBS and Allen for engineering something genuinely retro: this is the kind of show you used to be able to catch at 1am during a bout of insomnia. By letting that kind of low-rent, after-hours programming creep on the air before midnight, it feels like CBS is abandoning exactly the totems that should make them an obvious national network. Sure, buzzy prestige shows and laugh-out-loud comedies might migrate to streaming services, but now-imperiled institutions such as a nightly news broadcast or a late-night talk show serve as flags planted on the airwaves in ways that streamers have approached but cannot quite replace.
If there is an upside to this inevitable loss of the actual airwaves, maybe it is that people as brilliant as Colbert, O'Brien, and future talent like them will be freed of the compulsion to become part of that TV-history firmament. As great as O'Brien has been as a talk show host, the man wrote for some of the best eras of SNL and The Simpsons – he penned Marge vs the Monorail, for God's sake! Should not he be creating stuff outside the jolly-emcee grind? Colbert, too, has a rich history of satire as a co-creator of Strangers With Candy and the face of The Colbert Report. He is apparently going to be involved with a Lord of the Rings project, which will be a change of pace from monologue jokes about Donald Trump's shenanigans.
Really, network TV should count itself lucky that guys including Colbert or O'Brien were such enthusiastic employees for so long. If they are now looking at hawking their airtime like a tinpot real estate mogul instead of programming it like a network, maybe someone who cares about comedy, or variety, or television in general, will buy it up. Or maybe the networks will start to look like vacant lots, in a neighborhood where no one wants to live any more.
