The Death of Late Night

Stephen Colbert and the Late Show are being cancelled. News, but not a surprise. Apparently the show was losing 40 million USD per year.

The problem is that they were no longer attracting enough of the key demographic, those aged 18 to 54. This is the only TV audience advertisers care about.

Why, exactly? Don’t older people have money to spend?

Yes, but they also tend to have already made their choices. They are loyal to their preferred brands. They are no longer in the open market.

The loss of this key younger demographic tells us network television itself is dying. Only old people still watch, loyal to their preferred medium, out of force of habit.

The decline is probably irreparable, thanks to improving technology. It is not just that there is greater competition; the new competition on the Internet can narrowcast, offering a more targeted market for an advertiser. For most brands and products, this makes more sense than paying for everyone’s eyeballs.

But here is a second puzzle. Why are the late night comics seemingly doing their best to jump off that cliff, to hasten their own downfall? For years, they have become increasingly political and partisan. And stopped telling jokes. This obviously alienates a large portion of their potential audience: obviously not what you want to do if you are broadcasting.

Colbert, for example, will be forever best remembered for one skit in which he simply danced with a troupe dressed up as hypodermic needles, with no setup or gag, just the shout “vaccine” at the end of each bar. A sad legacy.

Was this some desperate and incompetent attempt to narrowcast on a broadcast medium? To fight for  bigger piece of a shrinking pie?

I think it illustrates instead a saying often wrongly attributed to Mahatma Gandhi, about how you change the public consciousness. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

This describes well the evolution of the political and social tendency often these days called “populism”; or, in the US, “MAGA.” It too is a product of the new technology.  With greater access to information, people are increasingly disinclined to trust the received consensus—that which is socially “broadcast” to them.

The late night comics, by the nature of their position on the networks, were committed to the old “broadcast” paradigm.  Being comics, they naturally saw their greatest influence and their main chance at the “then they laugh at you” phase. For some years, ridicule of this rebellious new turn of thought was the obvious and easy go-to for a gag. And it gave the comics great prestige and social influence. I remember not so many years ago the common comment that “I get all my news from the comedy shows.” Shows like the Daily Show.

But in going for the partisan gags, the late night hosts locked themselves into the “then they fight you” phase. As their habitual targets rose in power and influence, they were no longer funny. It was no longer a laughing matter. A few shrewd comics have managed to navigate this by flipping sides: Joe Rogan, Scott Adams, Russel Brand, Bill Maher. Many more seem to have dug themselves in too deep, becoming publicly identified primarily as a political figure.

I feel especially sorry for Jimmy Fallon, who early on seemed to see the risk, and tried to resist it. But when broadcasting is your livelihood, you are pretty locked in. You would have to kick against your employers as well as all your closest colleagues.

And now they are losing the argument.