The late-night TV shows usually hosted musical guests - at least 10 performances between the various shows each week, meaning 500+ per year. Big acts played all of the late-night shows as part of a promotional cycle, but perhaps more importantly, the late-night shows often gave new acts their first national exposure. The disappearance of these late-night performances is just one more way in which the status of music and musicians has fallen precipitously from its CD-era zenith.
One implication I would add is that the collapse of mass culture does not merely change the audience. It breaks the economics of the institutions built to serve that audience.
Late-night television was not just a format. It was an industrial product. It assumed a network, affiliates, advertisers, studios, unionized crews, writers’ rooms, production staffs, makeup, lighting, booking teams, compliance departments, executives, and a whole expensive apparatus designed for a world in which a sufficiently large share of the country could be gathered in front of the same screen at the same time.
That is the real pressure point. Colbert may well be more financially successful outside that legacy structure than inside it. If he takes a loyal portion of his audience to podcasting, YouTube, Substack, or some hybrid direct-to-audience model, he no longer needs to justify the cost structure of CBS. He does not need an audience large enough to carry a network. He only needs an audience large enough to carry Stephen Colbert Inc.
That is a very different equation.
A late-night show with millions of viewers can still be a business problem if it is attached to the economics of legacy television. But a podcaster with millions of loyal listeners can be a gold mine. The audience that is too small for the old machine may be enormous for a leaner, personality-driven media business.
This is also why I think the “was he cancelled?” framing is too narrow. The more interesting question is whether the network television model can still make sense for personalities whose appeal is intense but not universal. Colbert’s problem is not that he has no audience. It is that his audience is now better matched to the economics of niche media than to the economics of national broadcast television.
And that may be the deeper lesson. Mass culture did not just give us common references. It subsidized huge institutions that could afford to act as if they were speaking to the whole country. Once the audience fragmented, those institutions kept the overhead but lost the scale. The creator economy, for all its problems, reverses that. It lowers the overhead and monetizes intensity instead of universality.
So Colbert will probably be fine. The real question is whether CBS, late-night television, and the broader entertainment industry can keep carrying business models designed for a country that no longer gathers around the same cultural hearth.
For all the nostalgia we may have, it's not clear that having a handful of media outlets determining culture for the entire country was actually a good thing. Granted, it did make it easy to unify the country behind a desired narrative, regardless of whether it was true; propagandists could play on easy mode, since once you had the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, and CBS singing the same song, your work was basically done. But much of that unity seems to have been used to ensure that lies and harmful narratives that led us to the disastrous place we're in today received little pushback, except in marginal channels where the opponents could be dismissed as cranks. As for me, I'd rather live in a more divided world where at least the lies don't have complete hegemony.
The issue with the monoculture wasn't the facts or non-facts that were reported, it was that TV and to some extent newspapers tried to dictate the proper emotional reaction to particular types of news.
One still gets a strong sense when reading the New York Times that it is directing you on what is the only socially acceptable way to think about a particular issue or person.
The late-night TV shows usually hosted musical guests - at least 10 performances between the various shows each week, meaning 500+ per year. Big acts played all of the late-night shows as part of a promotional cycle, but perhaps more importantly, the late-night shows often gave new acts their first national exposure. The disappearance of these late-night performances is just one more way in which the status of music and musicians has fallen precipitously from its CD-era zenith.
One implication I would add is that the collapse of mass culture does not merely change the audience. It breaks the economics of the institutions built to serve that audience.
Late-night television was not just a format. It was an industrial product. It assumed a network, affiliates, advertisers, studios, unionized crews, writers’ rooms, production staffs, makeup, lighting, booking teams, compliance departments, executives, and a whole expensive apparatus designed for a world in which a sufficiently large share of the country could be gathered in front of the same screen at the same time.
That is the real pressure point. Colbert may well be more financially successful outside that legacy structure than inside it. If he takes a loyal portion of his audience to podcasting, YouTube, Substack, or some hybrid direct-to-audience model, he no longer needs to justify the cost structure of CBS. He does not need an audience large enough to carry a network. He only needs an audience large enough to carry Stephen Colbert Inc.
That is a very different equation.
A late-night show with millions of viewers can still be a business problem if it is attached to the economics of legacy television. But a podcaster with millions of loyal listeners can be a gold mine. The audience that is too small for the old machine may be enormous for a leaner, personality-driven media business.
This is also why I think the “was he cancelled?” framing is too narrow. The more interesting question is whether the network television model can still make sense for personalities whose appeal is intense but not universal. Colbert’s problem is not that he has no audience. It is that his audience is now better matched to the economics of niche media than to the economics of national broadcast television.
And that may be the deeper lesson. Mass culture did not just give us common references. It subsidized huge institutions that could afford to act as if they were speaking to the whole country. Once the audience fragmented, those institutions kept the overhead but lost the scale. The creator economy, for all its problems, reverses that. It lowers the overhead and monetizes intensity instead of universality.
So Colbert will probably be fine. The real question is whether CBS, late-night television, and the broader entertainment industry can keep carrying business models designed for a country that no longer gathers around the same cultural hearth.
Good point. Colbert can certainly do very well for himself as an independent. But he won't employ very many people.
For all the nostalgia we may have, it's not clear that having a handful of media outlets determining culture for the entire country was actually a good thing. Granted, it did make it easy to unify the country behind a desired narrative, regardless of whether it was true; propagandists could play on easy mode, since once you had the New York Times, Washington Post, ABC, NBC, and CBS singing the same song, your work was basically done. But much of that unity seems to have been used to ensure that lies and harmful narratives that led us to the disastrous place we're in today received little pushback, except in marginal channels where the opponents could be dismissed as cranks. As for me, I'd rather live in a more divided world where at least the lies don't have complete hegemony.
The issue with the monoculture wasn't the facts or non-facts that were reported, it was that TV and to some extent newspapers tried to dictate the proper emotional reaction to particular types of news.
One still gets a strong sense when reading the New York Times that it is directing you on what is the only socially acceptable way to think about a particular issue or person.
Standing ovation. Bravo!
Johnny Carson wasn't political, and he was talented. Thus he could get a big audience.
Colbert was political-- cutting off half or more of his potential audience, and was untalented. Thus, he got a small audience.
Cultural fragmentation wasn't the problem.