The late night television had become the venue where the nation shared evenings at the end of the day; nowadays it has become the venue of unexpected goodbyes that strike with strange impact.
The last episode that Stephen Colbert will host on The Late Show will be streamed on May 21, the date that Colbert announced on-air in his Jan. 27 episode. The time has come following the previous statement that the franchise would be terminated by CBS without stating a replacement a rather fresh-faced one at that when it used to consider host changes as a royal transition.
The night he initially informed the audience that there was an end to the show, Colbert made the choice appear as complete, not as a transition: “It is not just the end of our show, it is the end of the Late Show on CBS.” Next followed the clarifier which made the room reverberate sourly: “I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.” Colbert has remained less focused on his desk than what surrounded it and his ten-year tenure was a “fantastic job” and the last half-year has been something he would have liked to do with “this usual gang of idiots.”
That identification with the off-camera community has been capitalized upon by that date becoming tangible. In a recent visit to the studio of Seth Meyers, Colbert explained the shift in affect as the calendar is no longer abstract. “It seems now real,” he said, and there are but few months to go. The stingy bit, he said, is nothing to do with the monologue or the guest chair but the routine of a long-running group: “what I really love is the people I do it with.”
CBS management has maintained its explanation, the end is financial. Executives described Colbert as “irreplaceable” in the statement of the network, and claimed they would “retire the franchise” of the Late Show. Individual industry statistics have pegged actual figures to the headwinds, such as a 40% decline in advertising revenue since 2018 and an evaluation that the show had been operating on a loss of approximately 40 million annually. Those numbers appear next to the general truth that younger generations are more unlikely to consider 11:35 p.m. time to be booked and more willing to consider the changes to be that of a scroll: clips, segments, and interviews that can be ripped apart and stuck together to fit on phones. The show, as have its counterparts, has found that audience where it lives-posting and packaging to social sites but the economics of digital attention has never substituted the economics of broadcast habit.
Colbert has nevertheless talked like a person who is determined to make the remaining shows count as shows, but not as content. Instead he has praised Ed Sullivan Theater as a comic house, he has gone back and back to the crew as the true landscape to the job. Another running wish list that he has maintained has been a mixture of curiosity and autobiography, he has mentioned that he would love to host a guest such as Pope Leo XIV who was an American born Pontiff in Chicago. The biography of the new pope already is a pop-cultural shorthand: Catholic, American, and unusually readable among the U.S. audiences, including the fact that his degree in mathematics was earned at Villanova University in 1977, prior to joining the Augustinian order.
It is a date to the viewers on May 21. To the occupants of the building, it is a day to day workplace that is ticking down, one show at the time, to silence.
