The Late, Lamented, Show
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Last week, alongside a thousand other happy punters, I went to see Good Night, Oscar at the Barbican in London. The play, which stars Will & Grace’s Sean Hayes as popular polymath Oscar Levant, is set against the backdrop of an appearance on Jack Paar’s The Tonight Show, which he hosted from 1957 to 1962, the second comic to hold that post. Paar’s Tonight Show was never shown in the UK — nor, indeed, have any of the versions emceed by his successors (Johnny Carson, Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien or Jimmy Fallon, the incumbent). The Tonight Show, after all, airs on weeknights at 11:35pm ET or half-past 4 in the morning here in London, when I am far closer to wake-up than bedtime. Yet the audience at the Barbican laughed along with the jokes, with the cultural references being pinballed between Levant and Paar, and, crucially, seemed to get the stakes of late night TV.
More than 60 years after Levant lit up NBC with jokes about Marilyn Monroe going kosher so Arthur Miller “could eat her”, the landscape is remarkably unchanged. NBC has two main properties: The Tonight Show and Late Night (currently hosted by Seth Myers). Comedy Central has The Daily Show (Jon Stewart), HBO has Last Week Tonight (John Oliver) and Real Time (Bill Maher), and CBS has The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The same week that I went to see Good Night, Oscar — a celebration of the Golden Age of American wit — CBS announced that The Late Show would end in spring 2026. The network’s statement called this “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night”. Hollywood went into a period of vociferous mourning, with the programme’s defenders championing Colbert and the celebrity complex lamenting the loss of another staple talk show after CBS canned The Late Late Show in 2023. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” announced Donald Trump, the American president (don’tcha know). “His talent was even less than his ratings.”
That exchange is symbolic of the complex relationship that America has with its late night talk shows. On the one hand, there is an undeniably waning enthusiasm for them. For nine consecutive seasons, The Late Show was America’s 2nd rated comedy talk show (after Jimmy Kimmel Live!) yet from a peak of a 3.67m average audience in 2018, the show has fallen to around 1.9m in 2025. Yet, conversely, they continue to have the sort of cultural prominence that starts conversations (launches a thousand newsletter posts), and provokes gleeful obituarising from a sitting President.
It’s a bit like how, at the Barbican last week, amongst people who, largely, had never seen one of these shows, the cultural salience was still easily translated. Two of the best prestige comedy shows of reason years — Amazon Prime’s The Marvellous Mrs Maisel and HBO’s Hacks — have made the late night talk show a major, aspirational plot point. On the former, the lead character becomes a writer on the equivalent of the Johnny Carson show (Paar is a noted rival) and dreams of kickstarting her stuttering comedy career by appearing as his guest. On the latter, the protagonist (a Joan Riversesque grande dame of the Las Vegas strip) achieves her lifelong ambition of becoming the first woman to (permanently) host a late night talk show. The show’s celebrated fourth season revolved around the launch of Late Night with Deborah Vance, and provoked the same questions currently being faced by the industry. Is this a dying breed of show? Are advertisers skittish about changing demographics? How do you keep things fresh in the social media age? Do you chase ratings or diversify across platforms?
The decline of the late night show shouldn’t be a surprise. It is closely linked to a number or prevailing trends across the media. Fragmentation means that the foothold NBC, CBS and ABC had in American households is slipperier than ever. Netflix — the cable killer, or so it was feared — has been dipping its toe(s) into this market, launching My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman (an alumnus of both Late Night on NBC and the Late Show on CBS) and Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney, which is exactly the sort of hip rejig the networks have been working towards. Advertisers, too, have courted (too a fault) younger people who are less wedded to linear TV, and so money has drained out of the programming. There’s also the change to the way that publicity is conducted post-covid. Not only has theatrical distribution been challenged (and the late night shows existed in symbiotic balance with Hollywood) but so have the publicity contracts for those projects. And then there’s social media, which has turned the hour-long episodes (ok, more like 45-minutes once the adverts have been removed) into easily digestible chunks. Why sit through a waffling monologue, a musical guest you’re not into, and tediously stagey games, all to arrive at the 10-minute interview with a movie star that you’ve already seen filleted, for your delectation, on TikTok?
Everything is working against talk shows. Guest booking has become entirely reliant on the publicity cycle, in a way that was far less true in its golden age. Provocateurs like Oscar Levant — who attracted eyeballs, undoubtedly, including those of the FCC — wouldn’t get booked these days. The comics and writers who were so foundational to late night shows now go direct-to-consumer via YouTube or podcasts. Of the top podcasts in the world right now, plenty are hosted by people who’d make great guests on a late night show. Travis Kelce, Conan O’Brien, Marc Maron, Dax Shepherd, Bowen Yang, Jon Stewart, Will Arnett, Jason Bateman and Oscar Levant himself, Sean Hayes. This group of men (podcasts, like late night telly, are still overly male) could guest on a talk show or host it. But why bother with a crushing schedule and fickle network whims when the immediate and easy gratification of podcasting is there? In a way, the biggest comedy talk show launch of the past year has probably been Good Hang with Amy Poelher. It’s notionally a podcast, but the show also has 314k subscribers on YouTube (at time of writing), and the video version looks pretty much like a late night show, albeit one designed by Goop.
The difference, of course, is that Good Hang’s hour-long episodes have a single guest, rather than the old jamboree. Tina Fey, Dakota Johnson, Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Michelle Obama: there is no doubting Poehler’s booking clout. And celebrity guests seem increasingly to prefer this format, where they can be looser, more discursive, rather than having to perfect the famous cadence of talk show patter. (Nailed by Taylor Swift in the 10-min version of ‘All Too Well’, when she reproaches an ex, possibly Jake Gyllenhaal, because he “charmed my dad with self-effacing jokes/ Sippin’ coffee like you’re on a late-night show”). Folk who mastered that art — like Teri Garr or Norm Macdoland — became household names. But it’s a pain in the arse: far easier to have an hour long conversation and rest assured that a combination of in-house marketing departments and avid fans will deconstruct your conversation and harvest the juiciest morsels for easy consumption. “She said WHAT about her ex-wife?!” the Instagram caption will yell. “He’s going to be the first PANSEXUAL James Bond?!? Gagged!” they’ll write on X. All of this is sort-of antithetical to the ethoses of both comedy and interviewing.
But it’s where we’re headed. The idea of a late night talk show has become cultural fossilised. It operates better as a plot device than in actuality. In the 1950s and 60s, the TV networks were the great megaphone of the West; now that function is held by Big Tech companies. And without power, television descends into either sycophancy or partisanship. With the former, they become entirely in thrall to the zeitgeist, amplifying cultural ephemera and focusing excessively on what’s hot today. What movie is out in cinemas, which singer’s song is going viral on TikTok, which comedian is launching a new podcast aimed — hahaha — at killing talk shows. If the talent don’t need talk shows, then you have to butter them up, avoid offending them and make sure they rebook when the (inevitable) sequel is made. I’m currently reading Michael M. Grynbaum’s history of Condé Nast, Empire of the Elite, in which he recounts the fury of New Yorker staff after being bought by Condé Nast and having Tina Brown installed as editor. The magazine flat out refused to time a profile of Mel Brooks to coincidence with his latest movie, instead publishing it several months later with an oblique title. Such indulgence would be unimaginable now, anywhere in the media industry.
And then there’s partisanship. Part of the reason that Donald Trump has celebrated the sacking of Colbert and the general ratings decline of late night TV, is that it has been a consistent source of anti-Trump rhetoric. This is partly a function of the fact that Tinseltown leans Democrat and most mainstream comedy is liberal (if not exactly leftist). It’s also, partly, a result of the networks drilling into demographic data about who’s still watching these shows. Just as the New York Times has profited from a Trump premiership in an example of counter-cyclical economics, so too have outlets like The Daily Show. Colbert, for his part, made his name on The Colbert Report, where he satirised right-wing talkshows by playing a cartoonishly conservative version of himself. The fact that he graduated from that project to The Late Show is a demonstration of the fact that CBS didn’t mind abandoning the show’s few remaining Republican laggards.
If you are interested in conservative politics — or conservative comedy, in so much as it exists — the atomised ecosystem provides for you. The talk show used to be a prix fixe menu for America’s cultural consumption (“to start, the hot supporting actress in a sitcom on our network, followed by the hunky movie star headlining this month’s tentpole movie, following by a refreshing bust of an international pop-group who your kids are probably into”). It was as empowered by its audience’s limited access to alternative publicity as it was constrained by it. Now, we are in the post-prix fixe world, and consumers are circling the buffet. Harry Styles fans can hoover up content from wherever he appears (even gormless grinning segments on Dutch TV) rather than watching him await James Corden’s return like Greyfriars Bobby. Marvel fans can get their Marvel slop, KATSEYE fans can get their KATSEYE slop, hasbeen-footballer-making-MLS-debut fans can get their hasbeen-footballer-making-MLS-debut slop. Everyone eats at this buffet, and yet, somehow, nobody gets fat off it.
Yet, in the midst of that, there’s still a clear idea of what a late night comedy show should feel like. That’s a precious commodity in the media. Netflix’s experimentation with their live formats (something they are rumoured to be keen on expanding) have not reinvented the concept, but embraced its traditions. Colbert (“talent<ratings”, remember) will undoubtedly be a coveted acquisition for non-linear broadcasters (like Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney+, AppleTV+ etc) looking to make inroads in linearity. Once the dust has settled on Paramount’s protracted merger with Skydance (the CBS Entertainment Group is owned by Paramount) perhaps they too will want to experiment with live broadcasting via their over-the-top streaming service, Paramount+. A new version of the old thing; reinvention for reinvention’s sake.
Because if there’s one constant in the media, it’s the lustre of celebrity. That is the delicate power play at the heart of all entertainment products. And talk shows have sat, prismatic, in the middle of this, refracting the light emitted by these rare, glowing people. As our creative arts are assaulted by AI and thin margins squeeze an already beleaguered industry, the humanity (“oh, the humanity!” I wail, watching Hollywood go down in flames) has to persevere. And talk shows are the link between art and entertainment products, and the people who make them. It’s evangelising, sure, but it’s also translating. And that’s not a role that can be easily duplicated. “How am I supposed to listen to a podcast?” half the world still asks. “Who’s Theo Von and what is The Rizzler?” normal folk will enquire. Yet you don’t need to explain late night TV talk shows. The sofas, the coffee cups, the studio audience. Some of these parts will be replicated — lessons learned and applied elsewhere — but you don’t really need to have watched Late Night or The Late Show to know, to understand, its visual iconography. To be seen, without having been seen. That’s a power that can’t be cancelled.
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