TEN YEARS GONE: Stephen Colbert Shook Up Late-Night Twice, but His Push Into Politics Could Have Ultimately Hurt the Format.
The sense that late-night plays to a particular type of audience wasn’t supposed to be part of the mix. Johnny Carson made fun of politicians, but mostly their public goofs, not their policies. Leno rarely became political. And Letterman, often irascible, feuded with politicians but not over what they did in Washington. John McCain became a Letterman target because the former U.S. Senator canceled a 2008 appearance on “Late Show” in favor of talking to Katie Couric. When Letterman squabbled with former vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, it was because of a demeaning remark he made about Palin’s teenage daughter.
Late-night shows in 2026 are a wholly different creation. “These shows were built to be vaudeville in the box in your living room,” says Young. “They were a place to watch jugglers and clowns and funny people doing impressions. They were not made for this.”
Colbert wasn’t looking to alienate crowds. He was simply following what had already made him successful. This is, after all, an improv comedian and writer who got his big break working for Jon Stewart at Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” at a time when Stewart was presiding over a cable program that asked its young viewers to look harder at media and politics. Colbert did the unthinkable when he launched “Colbert Report” on Comedy Central in 200, playing a fictional character for nearly a decade who was meant to satirize conservative TV pundits.
So entrenched was the character in viewers’ minds that Colbert spent several sketches after he moved to CBS trying to separate himself from the creation he once played. Indeed, his former employer, Viacom, made outreach asking whether such use of intellectual property was fair. It didn’t help, of course, that the character shared Colbert’s name.
“Colbert never shook his ‘Colbert Report’ persona. That show was groundbreaking,” says Marx. “And he really brought some of that savvy audience with him from Comedy Central.”
Comedy Central’s fortunes rose and ebbed over how many younger male viewers it could reach. CBS’ hinged on the network’s ability to draw the biggest, broadest crowds. The challenge: The biggest crowd CBS could get was a cohort composed largely of people who wanted to see Colbert zing the powers-that-be. And maybe some hate-watchers, too.
Even as CBS won the ratings, the group of people watching late-night became less heterogenous. And as other hosts adopted a similar stance, more of midnight-TV viewership developed in the same way.
In which Variety either rewrites or stumbles upon the same observation that Robert Tracinski made in 2017 at The Federalist: “What were once cultural institutions with a broad, bipartisan audience are becoming niche players with a narrow fan base. They no longer view partisan politics as a dangerous move that will shrink their audience. Instead, they’re using partisan politics as a lure to secure the loyalty of their audience, or what is left of it. Not that it’s going to work over the long term, because people who want to have their biases confirmed will just watch the five-minute YouTube clip Chris Cillizza links to the next day.”
Like Conan O’Brien, Colbert will in short order reinvent himself as a podcaster and/or YouTuber. Or perhaps he’ll host a show on CNN or M-SNOW, albeit one with a far smaller budget.
