Why Colbert got canceled

Economics played a role. Politics might have, too. But mainstream liberal comedy has struggled between the death of mass culture and the rise of Trump.

Me, with more hair, on The Colbert Report in 2012.

There was a time not so long ago when going on TV with Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert was pretty much the best thing I could imagine.

According to IMDb, I appeared on The Daily Show seven times, The Colbert Report three times, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — which CBS announced last week will be canceled after 33 seasons on the air between Colbert and David Letterman — once, in 2016. I didn’t realize it had been quite so often¹ and I don’t remember all of those appearances. But in contrast to most of my TV hits — I’ve never found it to be a natural medium and always regarded it as something of a necessary evil — these were happy occasions, affirmations of my status as a member in good standing within a certain type of elite.

Over time, I got used to the routine. Stewart or Colbert would drop by the well-appointed green room at just the right moment, and the butterflies would start churning. These were high-stakes moments: these shows really moved the needle, as good an opportunity as I’d get to promote my books, FiveThirtyEight, or whatever else. I found the live audience² energizing as compared to taping from a studio — bringing my version of an A-game (which to most people would grade out as a B-minus). I’d impress friends by inviting them to the taping, and then we’d go out for one too many beers afterward. Stewart’s description of me as the “lord and god of the algorithm” in 2012 will possibly appear in my obituary.

So it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for Colbert, as well as a small sense of camaraderie. I had my own decade-long experience with a big TV network — FiveThirtyEight was a part of ESPN and then Disney-related-party ABC News — and it also ended suddenly and badly.

There are three prevailing theories for why Colbert got canceled — though he’ll be on the air for another 10 months, and I think this is an important detail in adjudicating between them:

• Democrats are convinced this is a sign of bending the knee to Trump as CBS corporate parent Paramount prepares for a merger with the media conglomerate Skydance, which will require approval by Trump’s FCC;

• Conservatives — and Trump — see it as a sign that Colbert wasn’t funny anymore, his show having become too inflected with politics;

• And CBS insists that neither factor has anything to do with it: it was a bottom-line decision for a program that reportedly was losing tens of millions a year on an annual budget of more than $100 million.

Politics might have been a factor, but progressives could stand to bring some proof of this

It’s surely not ridiculous to assert that the networks and other major media brands are trying to get on Trump’s good side. In fact, it’s a reasonable prior. My former employer, ABC News, bowed to Trump, spending $15 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit against George Stephanopoulos. A phalanx of liberal columnists left the Washington Post after its owner, Jeff Bezos, quashed a Kamala Harris endorsement and pledged “change” toward a more libertarian/centrist direction in its opinion pages. Not just CNN, but even MSNBC fired some of its more outspoken liberal hosts. And Colbert called it a “big, fat bribe” last week after Paramount announced its own settlement with Trump.

Although you’d have to evaluate them on a case-by-case basis, these decisions don’t necessarily reflect the bottom line alone, the accounting department meticulously trimming a damaged P&L. Some of these personalities were popular. Jennifer Rubin — late of the Washington Post, now of The Contrarian — and former CNN’er Jim Acosta have found considerable success on Substack, helping to fuel growth and a higher valuation for the platform.³ Meanwhile, the Post experienced a massive number of canceled subscriptions after Bezos’s increasing editorial intervention.

The vibe shift toward conservatism was overstated, and rather than skate to where the puck is going, media executives chronically fight the last war — how many failed “pivots to video” have there been? On top of that, they’re run by rich guys who were never fully on board with the progressive leanings of the East Coast media hiring pool that will inevitably populate the staff of their organizations.

And yet, especially if progressives see themselves as being the more evidence-driven political tribe, it would be nice to see some proof that this was the reason for CBS’s decision. Headlines in liberal publications boldly assert that the firing must have been driven by politics and then only acknowledge several paragraphs later that they’re speculating. Even MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, an unabashed progressive but someone who’s usually sober-minded, raised the stakes by asserting that it was “not really an overstatement to say that the test of a free society is whether or not comedians can make fun of the country's leader on TV without repurcussions⁴.”

Again, none of this is inherently implausible. As I’ll discuss below, I think politics was possibly a contributing factor. But the fact that The Late Show will air for almost another year, giving Colbert a platform to go scorched-earth against CBS, Paramount, Skydance and Trump, is evidence against it. This is not how things were done at ABC/ESPN, for instance: they wanted people out the door as quickly as possible, even if they were still cashing a Disney paycheck.⁵

Could The Late Show really have had a budget of $100+ million?

Statements filtered to the press by corporate PR departments on politically sensitive matters ought to be regarded with suspicion. The PR people employed by major media brands are usually good at their jobs, but they can be ruthless. While CBS probably has some basis to justify the $100 million figure, there are always a lot of ways to run the numbers, like how you allocate shared revenues or shared services.

Still, The Late Show has long carried a headcount of more than 200 employees. Many of them are likely quite long-tenured, protected by unions or by office politics. My experience with ABC News suggests that most of them are dedicated and highly skilled professionals, but some are also coasting, and the pay scale might not have much to do with their contribution to the bottom line. It’s not hard to imagine that they’re making an average of something like $250K per year per person, counting benefit packages, which are often generous at the big media brands.

Take 200 x $250K … that’s $50 million. On top of that, Colbert was reportedly making between $15 and $20 million a year. If Paramount was then allocating some costs to the Late Show for a dedicated studio on a prime block in Midtown, equipment for a show with a pristine production values, plus travel and accommodation for guests — considerably nicer, in my experience, than for your typical late-afternoon TV hit — you could easily approach the nine figures.

And until recently, CBS executives might not have been motivated to scrutinize the budget since the show was making money. But The Late Show’s ad revenues reportedly plunged from $121 million in 2018 to $70 million last year amidst declining ratings: about 2.1 million per episode in June, down from 3.1 million at the peak, less than 200K of whom were “in the demo”, meaning the 18-to-49 years olds that advertisers covet.

Earning $70 million in ad revenues per year is still substantial, especially for a flagship brand that might have a halo effect on the rest of the network. (Seriously, have you heard of “Fire Country” or “George & Mandy’s First Marriage”? They’re some of CBS’s top-rated scripted shows.) So why not trim the budget, as painful as that might be, rather than throw the baby out with the bathwater?

Well, a couple of reasons. Mass layoffs can sidestep internal politics. They won’t have the same effect on the morale of the existing staff if there’s no staff left. They may have accounting advantages. And it’s hard to get people to accept pay cuts, which is why most economists think that a little bit of inflation (so that pay cuts are disguised among increased cost-of-living) can be helpful for the economy.

But also, and not to put too fine a point on it, corporate executives at big traditional media brands often aren’t very bright. ABC News execs often had shockingly little knowledge of which FiveThirtyEight features were bringing in traffic, how to monetize the site, or contract terms for me and other key employees. If a bloated dinosaur of an organization, such as a major network — CBS was founded in 1927 — never develops the muscle memory for scrutinizing expenses or maximizing revenues, it may struggle to do so even when the economics change to make it vital.

To Paramount Global, The Late Show is still just a rounding error: Paramount recorded $29 billion in revenues last year.⁶ Here’s where politics could have been a factor, though. The extent to which corporate suits will tolerate a loss from a high-prestige but money-losing division of the company may well depend on both the external and internal political environment.

One of the lessons that I took away from my tenure at Disney is that, if you’re a barnacle clinging to the whale of very large media brand that literally strikes 11-figure deals — CBS’s current NFL contract runs at $2.1 billion per year for 11 seasons — your performance doesn’t matter as much as the opinions of investors about the overall direction of the company or the political incentives of your bosses. If a new division head steps in who wants to rectify the excesses of the previous administration, or a new corporate parent takes over that wants to demonstrate to investors that it can trim costs, you might be a sitting duck so long as the P&L is in the red.

And if you’re also a political pain-in-the-ass, that might be a decisive tiebreaker. I think it’s quite possible that CBS executives didn’t think they’re making this decision to placate Trump or for other nakedly political reasons. But if Harris had been elected instead of Trump, their decision might have been different; the show would perhaps at least have been given an opportunity to cut costs before the hammer came down. You might be able to survive losing money, and you might be able to survive being a political headache for the suits, but probably not both at once.

The day center-left comedy died

Could The Late Show have been saved if Colbert had maintained an edgier brand of humor? I’m not exactly in a position to judge. Not only am I not a comedy critic: I basically don’t consume any linear TV at all apart from sports.

So, sticking to the data: Fox News’s Gutfeld!⁷ has ratings that are meaningfully better than Colbert’s — 3.1 million viewers per episode in June compared to his 2.1 million — but not dramatically so. And for essentially all television programming apart from the NFL, ratings are substantially lower than they once were. It’s a dying medium, and your priors should generally be that any such decisions have to do with economics first, politics second, and the quality of the content a distant third.

With that said, the late-night hosts aren’t in an easy position. Even in a post-woke era, poking fun at liberal shibboleths can still trigger an outraged reaction from critics and, perhaps more importantly, largely younger and more progressive staffers. And comedy usually isn’t very good when you have to tiptoe around people’s sensitivities.

On June 14, 2021, Colbert returned to taping before a live audience after a 15-month remote hiatus during the pandemic. The guest of honor was his mentor, Stewart. The subject, naturally enough, was COVID, and within a couple of minutes, Stewart twisted a rhetorical dagger. “I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has in many ways helped ease the suffering of this pandemic, which was more than likely caused by science,” he said, referring to the lab-leak theory. Colbert ably played along, taking a dramatic gulp of whatever beverage was in his coffee mug, but Stewart pressed on. “How did this happen? They’re like, oooh, a pangolin kissed a turtle?”.

Watch it now, and it’s not clear to what extent Stewart was doing a “bit” — ironically pantomiming the role of the right-wing, Bill O’Reilly-esque host that Colbert had once mocked on The Colbert Report before becoming more of a straight man on The Late Show. But he was unambiguously being provocative. I’m not about to go on too much of a detour about lab leak versus natural origin, but the scientific consensus has shifted more in the direction of the lab leak since that episode aired. This is precisely the sort of issue on which progressives ought to have reflected on their premises more carefully, whether provoked by comedy or by other means.

And Stewart, predictably, was roasted for it, and not just by the liberal voices who get outraged about everything. Here, at some length, was the account the next day in the New York Times by the Times’s chief television critic, James Poniewozik:

And he proceeded to talk — no, rant — no, evangelize — about the lab-leak theory of Covid-19, riffing sarcastically about the initial Covid-19 emergence in Wuhan, China, home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

“There’s been an outbreak of chocolaty goodness near Hershey, Pa. What do you think happened?” he asked. “Maybe a steam shovel mated with a cocoa bean?”

Now, I am not going to adjudicate Stewart’s scientific reasoning. God help us when we rely on comedians to solve microbiology, or on TV critics to peer-review their findings.

But within the context of “The Late Show,” the lab-leak theory is one that was demagogued by President Trump, who blatantly embraced racist rhetoric about China and the pandemic. The theory — at least, the less conspiratorial version of it — has since been opened to investigation by the Biden administration. But given the history, it arrives in the context of the “Late Show” fan base as something that bad people bring up, for bad reasons.

Now here was Jon Stewart building an entire comedy routine out of it. And it made for interesting, productively dissonant TV. Colbert, occasionally pushing back, often letting Stewart roll, was caught between his old friend and his audience’s expectations. “How long have you worked for Sen. Ron Johnson?” he asked, referencing the Wisconsin Republican who has been Patient Zero for Covid misinformation.

The segment was charged in a way that it couldn’t have been without a live audience there, in the room. Even the eventual common-ground conclusion that Colbert steered Stewart toward — that science can go too far without thinking of the consequences — carried a charge, given how the last year (and more) has made “science” a poster-board synonym for anti-Trumpism.

In a way, the encounter was like watching 2015 make a guest appearance in 2021. A lot has changed in talk TV since Stewart left “The Daily Show” (though the bit, right or wrong, also showed how he can sustain a comedic argument when he’s engaged about something).

But also, a lot has changed since Colbert was last in front of a crowd at the Ed Sullivan. There wasn’t just a pandemic. There was George Floyd’s murder and the ensuing protests, which Batiste engaged in. (He performed “Freedom” on Monday night, from his anthemic album “We Are.”) There was an election and an attack on the Capitol and the inauguration of President Biden, whom Dana Carvey played with “Come on, man” fidelity on Monday’s show.

I’m not looking to upbraid Poniewozik, who was writing during a period of extreme internal political turmoil at the Times.⁸ But he was eager enough to accept the role of a moral authority, a role the Times often plays on the center-left. And made clear that this sort of humor was out of bounds, even if it made for good TV, which he concedes it probably did. Stewart wasn’t merely talking, Poniewozik wrote: no, he was ranting, even evangelizing. Well, have you ever watched comedy before? This type of hyperbole is par for the course. And while it’s far from the funniest segment I’ve ever watched, Stewart’s routine was considerably funnier than Colbert’s cringeworthy literal song-and-dance routine about the vaccine.

I have no way to prove this, but I think this incident — not the first time he’d been scolded by the left — played a role in the failure of Stewart’s next venture, The Problem with Jon Stewart on Apple, which was canceled after two seasons amid mediocre critic ratings and even more mediocre audience ratings. That show was aiming for more substance, but it was also unabashedly woke, with the voice of his presumably progressive staff writers coming through more than his own. Viewers might tolerate some of this, but they were basically looking for Stewart to be a sarcastic wise-ass and not venture too far into the territory occupied by John Oliver.

This sort of scoldy, know-it-all attitude has become regrettably fashionable on the left — I dare you to crack a joke on BlueSky — and Democratic politicians seem out of practice with any situation in which spontaneous humor might be involved. Compare Trump’s relatively fluid appearance with Theo Von last year, in which the subject matter ranged as far afield as Von’s former cocaine use, against Harris’s comment that “bacon is a spice” to a Muslim TikToker who doesn’t consume pork, an exchange so awkward that the episode never aired. It’s a particularly hard sell among the prime audience for being a sarcastic wise-ass: young men, many of whom migrated to Trump last year.

I don’t think this is the main reason The Late Show got canceled, although a lack of resonance among young men will hurt your numbers “in the demo”. But it contributed to making the show cancelable.

Last year, I got an invitation to appear again on The Daily Show, which Stewart now hosts once a week. We⁹ turned them down, even though I was trying to promote a book.¹⁰ The downside, we thought, was palpable: I’d have been happy to sit for a regular, anything-goes interview, but we didn’t trust the producers’ sensibilities when it came to an edited segment. But just as importantly, the upside wasn’t there the way it might have been a decade ago. The Daily Show — and even The Late Show — weren’t necessarily a better use of my time than a niche podcast that might have a smaller audience but would convert more efficiently to book sales. Stewart has never found the same cultural relevance after leaving The Daily Show. Colbert got a modest bump after leaving Comedy Central for CBS, but the only thing that’s arrested the downward trajectory since then is his cancelation.

Outside of sports and perhaps Taylor Swift, there’s really no mass culture anymore. And the job of a late-night host is to at once be an arbiter of mass culture and to push against the boundaries of acceptable taste. There are far worse jobs, and certainly lower-paying ones, but this is a thankless task all the same, and tips over into impossible when liberals aggressively police those boundaries for any defections from the party line. Colbert will land on his feet, and possibly even be better off in the end. But the era of the late-night host as a broadly acceptable cultural focal point is as dead as Blockbuster Video. I’ll miss it, but Stewart might have had the right idea when he first retired from The Daily Show ten years ago.

1. I think a couple of those were cases where I played some sort of cameo role instead of being the main guest.

2. Though if I’m recalling correctly, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report weren’t quite live, instead aired with a delay of a couple of hours to protect both hosts and guests against catastrophic fuck-ups.

3. As someone who accepted an invitation to purchase equity in Substack late last year, I’m pleased.

4. Misspelling in original.

5. When ESPN announced on a spring day in 2015 that Bill Simmons would be fired from Grantland, he never wrote for the site again. (Though Grantland carried on for some time without Simmons.) And amidst the FiveThirtyEight layoffs in 2023 and my announcement that I’d be leaving the site — I wasn’t technically part of the layoff but my contract was about to expire, and there was no interest from either party in renewing — I didn’t get some kind of goodbye column, either. Even the NBA writer Zach Lowe was frozen out by ESPN when he still had a season left to go on his contract, cashing a Disney paycheck but otherwise absent from covering the league until he landed back with Simmons.

6. Though it reported a $5 billion operating loss.

7. The exclamation point, for some reason, is in the official title of the show!

8. I don’t seek out much TV criticism because I don’t watch much TV, but his takes have always struck me as thoughtful and reasonable.

9. The “royal we” in this case indicating me plus the PR team at my publisher, Penguin Press.

10. We’d quickly devised that the segment was going to be something squaring me off against Allan Lichtman, the political scientist behind the failed “13 Keys to the White House” method that had confidently predicted a Harris victory, whom I had less than zero interest in engaging with. I never got around to publishing a full critique of Lichtman’s method, but you can find an abbreviated version in SBSQ #14.