Trying to produce a topical late night show that appeals equally to fans and detractors of the current administration sounds like a surefire way to get a 0 share.
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CBS cancels The Late Show
- Thread starter EricSam
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Because it's wrong. Colbert said last night that show is about love. He loves everybody.
The proof is in the pudding as evidenced by the content of his nightly show. To any objective viewer, it’s a directed appeal to only one half of the nation’s available audience. (And I’m no fan of either political party.)
It’s no wonder that Johnny Carson and his big-tent approach is viewed as the pinnacle in late night broadcasting.
and may be obsolete in the current environment, you're either too soft or too hard on the current admin
Yeah, but it's not just the approach, it's the talent. Leno played it down the middle. Conan was largely apolitical, as was Letterman.
Fallon wasn't political until he started getting his ass handed to him in the ratings by Colbert and Kimmel.
I don't think Craig Ferguson ever told a political joke. Maybe we should bring him back. Of course, Geoff Peterson couldn't be gay anymore, but...
And Sid the Cussing Bunny would have to clean up his act...
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Look at any show and tell me how big the staff is. Soap Operas probably have just as many.
Yeah, but that number includes tech crew, graphics folks, pages, the folks outside who corral audience attendees until they're seated, staff who answer ticket requests, music arranger(s) or licensing coordinators, security, building maintenance, admins, etc. etc. People who don't show up on camera, but are essential to the smooth operation of the program. Any of the other shows has similar behind-the-scenes support staff, even if their number doesn't quite make it to 200.
I get all that, but the size of the staff that and the expense of the Ed Sullivan Theater are why the show is losing money. Not because of ratings.
SNL costs 1 million an episode.
It's not, all a cop out to get the merger approved.
Was the show making money five years ago? Ten years ago? (Hint: if it wasn't, it would never have made it to its tenth anniversary.) Was Letterman's show making money for 22 years? He was also leasing the Ed Sullivan bldg. The problem isn't the cost of that lease (unless CBS raised the price astronomically recently) or the amount of staff, it's that the advertising market for network TV has virtually collapsed. I agree the show's likely losing money, but call balls and strikes fairly. Colbert doesn't sell the ad time on his show, that's CBS. If they can't sell enough ads -- and the OTA end product doesn't support that assumption -- or they can't get their price and have to cut deals to fill the time, that's also not Colbert's making. Not when they're trying to sell the top-rated late night show.
Maybe, ya think, maybe they should rethink the strategy of giving away the product on Youtube? Out here in California, I get to watch Stephen's (and the Jimmy's, and Seth's) monologues hours before they air on the local stations. What's my incentive to stay up past midnight to watch it OTA? (Well, in my case I'm a retired nightowl, but that's just me...)
Edited to fix my grammar.
I seriously doubt the budget is that low per episode. Especially once all the overhead costs are accounted for. They do 20 or 22 live shows a year. Studio 8A is dedicated to SNL for a large part of the year. How much do you think that costs the SNL budget, distributed over 20 or 22 new shows? Set designers, carpenters, painters, movers, tech crew, all that overhead I detailed above (in #27) for Colbert's show (much of which, by the way, is union)? One Mil per episode, fully loaded, doesn't pass the sniff test.
The world has changed. There’s a lot less middle ground—not saying it’s good, bad, or indifferent, but the schisms have grown considerably since Mr. Carson was doing his thing. It’s naive to think someone could do that same routine now and have comparable success. Then layer in the added competition that Carson spent much of his career not dealing with. The phrase apples-to-oranges comes to mind.
We're also long past the era when the President and other top politicians held themselves to a standard of speech, behavior, and decorum where the most you could joke about was them tripping on the stairs of a plane or wearing the wrong color of suit.
Oh, I agree. But the Colbert/Kimmel late night shows began their decline when they decided to go full-on political for one side instead of the big tent with its bigger audiences. I also suspect it’s also the “United States of NewYork/Hollywood” mentality.
There is no "big tent." If you want to be topical, someone will be offended.
The other way might be considered by some to be "politically correct."
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He said that it used to be about love.,..
That however can’t be separated from what was happening in technology and the ever expanding amount of content available on multiple devices. And as noted above, the big tent idea is almost a unicorn.
You can either entirely ignore politics, but the odds you get a lot of people in that tent here in 2025 are low. Or you can try to both-sides it, which just irks both groups. We’re past the point of no return in terms of almost everything being separated by political fault lines. The restaurants we eat at. The cars we drive. The movies we see. Everything has a subtext. Of course there are exceptions, but it’s hard to escape the way the lines have generally hardened.
No. The actual quote, transcribed:
“In September of 2015, Spike Jonze stopped by my office and said, ‘Hey, what do you want this show to be about?’” I said, ‘Ah, Spike, I don't know how you could do it, but I'd kind of like to do a late-night comedy show that was about love.’”
“And I don't know if I ever figured that out, but at a certain point, and you can guess what that point was, I realized that in some ways, we were doing a late-night comedy show about loss.”
“That's related to love because sometimes you only truly know how much you love something when you get a sense that you might be losing it. 10 years later, in September of 2025 my friends, I have never loved my country more desperately.”
“God bless America. Stay strong, be brave, and if the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy and punch a higher floor.”
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