Best of 2025: The End of Late Night Television

Title: Best of 2025: The End of Late Night Television

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Iru Ekpunobi: What does it mean when a bedrock of New York City late-night television gets the axe? This year, we took a look into CBS's cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Iru Ekpunobi, in for Janae Pierre. This week on NYC Now, we're looking back at some of our favorite stories of the year. Back in July, CBS announced that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will end in 2026. The day after, Colbert announced the news himself on his show.

Stephen Colbert: I want to let you know something that I found out just last night. Next year will be our last season. The network will be ending The Late Show in May.

Audience: No.

Iru Ekpunobi: Colbert has filmed the show in Manhattan since 2015, when he took over for David Letterman. Since then, he's become one of the most recognizable voices in political comedy. Why is the network pulling the plug, and what does it mean for late-night TV and comedy as a whole? To help us answer these questions, our host, Janae Pierre, spoke with Jason Zinoman, comedy critic at The New York Times, who's been writing about late-night for years and published a piece on what Colbert's cancellation might actually signal. That conversation after the break.

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Janae Pierre: What do Times Square, a cold slice of pizza, and late-night TV all have in common? They're all part of New York's mythology. You don't have to like them, but you know what they are and trust that they'll always be there. Now one of those icons is going away. CBS says The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will end in 2026. I'm joined by Jason Zinoman, comedy critic at The New York Times. He's been writing about late-night for years and recently published a piece about what Colbert's cancellation might actually signal. Jason, walk us through what happened. What did CBS decide? Tell me, was it just as surprising as I thought it was?

Jason: Yes. I was stunned. Maybe I shouldn't have been stunned because late-night has been struggling as a form, but this is a franchise that's been around since 1993. In a lot of ways, the host of The Late Show is the face of CBS. You don't see franchises disappear very often. Certainly not one with this number of decades behind it, so when I got the text, I was surprised. Then once I thought about it, you perhaps could see the tea leaves a little bit.

Janae Pierre: All right. Walk me through what happened. Why did CBS come to this conclusion?

Jason: This is the big question. There's no definitive answer to this. We know what they say. The big debate falls under two-- There's two explanations. One is that, according to them, it's a financial decision that the show's been losing $40 or $50 million a year. I think they call it a purely financial decision, although I'm not sure that there is such a thing exists, really. Then this happens in a context. The other explanation is that this is a political decision, that CBS and Paramount, its parent company, is in the process of a merger with Skydance that needs the Trump administration's approval, and Trump has been outspoken in criticizing Stephen Colbert.

It certainly looks like, in an effort to complete this merger, CBS and Paramount gave a gift to Donald Trump. The other piece of evidence to support this would be that they just recently settled this suit with 60 Minutes, which was certainly politically motivated. This is the big question. Many people think it's political, many people think it's financial. To me, it seems obvious that it's both. I think that it's fair to approach Paramount's explanation with a good deal of skepticism.

For as long as I've been covering late-night, we've always judged the success of a show based on ratings. All we know is ratings. That's the metric for success. It's become a little bit more difficult in recent years as streaming has ascended, because we don't know ratings in quite the same level of detail. Suddenly, the explanation for why this is a financial decision is that money, when we get this number 40, 50 million, there's no question that Colbert is the highest ratings in his time slot. That doesn't make sense.

They say, "If it's losing all this money, then clearly it's a financial decision," but we don't know what the finances are of, say, the Nightly News or the Morning Show or how much money these competitors are losing, because all of a sudden, we're suddenly on this playing field where the metrics are money, which everybody is fairly ignorant about, and not ratings. I would say that's another cause for skepticism.

Janae Pierre: You talked about the reasoning behind the cancellation of The Late Show: money and politics. I'm just wondering, what does this decision tell us about where comedy and satire fit in this current media landscape?

Jason: There's two different questions. For late-night shows, I think it's another in a long series of bad signs that this is not a great economic model. Does this mean that satire at large is under threat? Certainly, this administration is going after comedy in a way that no other administration in history is. That's for sure true. Comedy is very resilient, and you see this almost less than a week after this announcement, when South Park signed a $1.5 million deal with Paramount, and immediately did probably the most biting critique of Trump that has been done since his second administration started.

Janae Pierre: In your recent piece, you wrote that this cancellation might actually be a good thing for Stephen Colbert. Why is that?

Jason: He's a talented guy who has a big audience, and we have this landscape now where there's many different options. You don't need to have a network show to have an outlet. In fact, you could look at it as a great opportunity for him. I think the height of Colbert's career artistically, I would argue, was The Colbert Report, which was a much smaller operation than the Ed Sullivan Theater and The Late Show. To some degree, he was putting on this big kind of mainstream showbiz entertainment in a big theater, but he's got a lot of skills, and he can do a lot of different things.

He's the kind of guy who can talk in depth and quite seriously about the issues of faith, about literature, he's great at improv, things that don't necessarily lend itself to a big theater and short clips on national television. I could, for example, easily see him being a really successful podcaster, which he's already made some hints that he's interested in, and we have a model for this, which is Conan O'Brien. Here was a guy whose dream was to be in The Tonight Show, late-night host for many decades.

When he left late night, people thought this was a disaster for him. The opposite has happened. It's been great for his career. His podcast is a big success, he has an HBO show that's done well, and he was made the host of the Oscars, which he never was when he had his late show. The reason I said this could be the best thing ever happened as Colbert is that he probably would have left the show in the next couple of years anyways. Now he leaves the show in a way that makes him look, at least, like a political martyr. There's one thing we've learned from the kind of incessant and often annoying debates about cancel culture. It's that being canceled can be very profitable.

Janae Pierre: [chuckles] Yes, yes. Earlier in our conversation, you mentioned that late-night TV has been struggling. What's behind that shift?

Jason: I think there's a couple of things. The biggest is the fragmentation of the culture, that there's so many different options, that when late night was at its height, when Johnny Carson was being watched by 15, 20 million people, there were only a couple networks, only a couple options. The other thing is the internet made late night a misnomer. You don't need to watch it. If you're summing up the news at night, it's already been joked about before, so they started releasing clips earlier, not in late night. Even if you didn't watch them earlier, people would often watch it the next day because they could just watch it on YouTube.

The whole form, the whole idea of it, has broken down and has been turned into content for YouTube, and the late-night shows that do well are ones that really have adjusted to that. John Oliver, for instance, does very well on YouTube. Colbert, less so. Although he has the highest ratings in terms of television households, he doesn't for YouTube. I think this gets a little outside my area of expertise, but I think that the bigger picture is that the ad rates for late-night have plummeted. I think that is really what made late-night so lucrative, is that, for so long, it was relatively cheap and the advertising dollar was huge.

Since the pandemic, the advertising numbers have gone way down. Why that is, I'm the wrong person to ask, but I will say I see some parallels between that business and my business, the newspaper business, where it was largely an advertising business for a long period of time and a lot of the money came from advertising until the internet came along and the advertising became less valuable and now The New York Times gets a majority of its money from subscriptions. The fundamental thing is the internet has shifted the business away from advertising.

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Janae Pierre: Jason Zinoman is a comedy critic at The New York Times. Jason, thanks so much for your time.

Jason: Thank you. This was fun.

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Iru Ekpunobi: Thanks for listening to NYC Now from WNYC. I'm Iru Ekpunobi. We'll be back tomorrow with some more of our best reporting from 2025.

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