Thank you to anyone who tuned into the Substack live about The Late Show with Stephen Colbert finale, with myself and Perry Bacon Jr. (w/The New Republic), yesterday morning. Here is the recording for anyone interested in listening to our chat.
Our conversation was mostly guided by a chronological walk down memory lane, recounting politicians’ appearances on late-night talk shows over the years. From Bill Clinton on The Arsenio Hall Show in 1992, to Arnold Schwarzenegger on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 2003, and Joe Biden on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in 2015.
But I thought I’d write a little bit more about what political science research tells us about The Late Show with Stephen Colbert cancelation and where late night TV could be headed. It’s not a post about gender gaps, so apologies in advance for deviating from the theme of this substack, today.
The broadcast late-night model is under strain
Thursday was the last episode of CBS’s The Late Show.
Does the cancelation of The Late Show signal the end of an era? On some level, the answer is yes, but not necessarily because audiences no longer want celebrity interviews or political comedy, but because the entire broadcast late-night model is cracking under other pressures.
Late-night TV was built around appointment television. Appointment television is television where audiences sit down at a particular time and turn on a particular channel, to watch a program. But streaming, social media, YouTube clipping, and algorithmic discovery have fundamentally broken that model. Yes, people are still consuming late-night content, but much of the audience is not accessing it on the platforms that originally air the show. And it seems like broadcast networks still haven’t figured out how to measure or monetize that kind of attention. But CBS is the first to jettison the traditional franchise altogether.
Because CBS was the first to drop their late night host (likely not coincidentally after new ownership took over) there’s a separate question embedded in all of this: did the politicization of late-night help set its decline in motion? That story is more complicated.
Yes, there is a political skew to late-night viewers, today. According to a 2024 YouGov poll (N = 15,000), 38% of Democrats say they watch late-night comedy somewhat or very often, compared to just 22% of Republicans — a 16-point partisan gap. (Among Independents it’s just 21%). And when you ask Democrats, Republicans and Independents if they think late-night comedy shows are political, 57% of Republicans say they are too liberal (but just 28% of Independents agree with that), which explains much of why Republicans are less likely to be regular viewers of these shows.
How did late night come to be seen as partisan by Republicans, like much of the rest of news media? It’s not simply a case of Trump’s war on the media, although that is certainly related. But late-night comedy shows began to take on a more adversarial role with government long before the Trump years. In the 1990s that looked like jokes mocking the party in power, typically, but over time that mocking evolved into more substantive criticism. The Daily Show, Colbert Report and others like it were part of that evolution, with their even more biting tone, especially during the George W. Bush years, and the Iraq War. In other words, the party in power at the height of these shows’ influence was the Republicans.
That era also maps onto a moment when Democrats were becoming increasingly the party of college-educated professionals, and these shows rewarded a particular style of political engagement — irony, fact-checking, performative intelligence, and in-group cultural fluency. For audiences who valued those traits, the shows were especially affirming. To audiences who didn’t share those norms, they could read as exclusionary or condescending.
Adding to that, in her book, Irony and Outrage, Danna Young, a professor at University of Delaware, explains that liberal audiences tend to gravitate toward irony, satire, ambiguity, and parody, while conservative audiences tend to gravitate toward outrage-based commentary that is emotionally direct, and more often found in certainty-driven formats like talk radio or cable opinion. In this manner, as political identity becomes more enmeshed with social identity, sitting down to watch a political comedy show based in satire was hardly a neutral choice.
And last, the political and structural conditions that gave rise to modern late-night comedy created strong incentives for these shows to become more political, like their Comedy Central peers, and in many ways that trajectory was inevitable.
Traditional news media has a strong negativity bias, which left a void for late-night to fill. Growing distrust in mainstream media created an opening for hosts to move further into political commentary — these shows became places where audiences processed politics through humor, satire, and personality. And politicians increasingly used appearances on these shows to humanize themselves in lower-stakes environments. In this sense, there was a reciprocal relationship between candidates campaigning for public office, and the late-night talk shows. The candidates could come on these shows to connect with audiences on a more personal level, and it was up to the late-night hosts to decide how hardball their interviews would get.
For at nearly two decades, these shows entertained guests from both parties. But that shifted after Trump.
Trump built the one-party late-night environment by accident
Because these shows mocked and made fun of the Trump administration, Trump spent years branding them — and their hosts — as liberal propaganda machines, shills for the left, and enemies of real America. Like clockwork, he would send out social media posts as he watched these shows in real time, that took the hosts to task, for his ever-growing audiences. These criticisms were absorbed by his supporters, and as a result, the shows, like the media more broadly, grew to be more liberal-coded.
As a result, any Republican who walks onto one of those stages now isn’t just doing a TV appearance — they’re committing an act of ideological betrayal, legitimizing the very platform their own leader declared illegitimate.
As a result, these shows book mostly Democrats when they feature politicians, which further exacerbates the conspiratorial belief that these shows are left-wing propaganda. All together, Trump handed the hosts a more one-sided platform than they might have occupied otherwise.
So what does all of this mean for the future of late night?
The politicization story is real, but it’s also somewhat beside the point. These shows became liberal-coded, yes — partly through their own evolution, partly through Trump’s active effort to make them so, and partly because the audience most drawn to irony and satire happens to be the same audience that moved toward the Democratic Party over the last two decades. But that is a feedback loop, not a conspiracy.
But the deeper issue is that we no longer have a shared media environment in which something like late-night could matter to everyone. The fragmentation that killed the ratings is the same fragmentation that sorted the audience politically. And until we reckon with what it means to live in a media landscape with less common ground, the loss of late-night is really just a symptom of something much larger.
Still, the format isn’t dead. But it is being disaggregated. And new hosts and formats will fill in that vacuum, with time.
