Josherich's Blog

The Demise of Late-Night TV Is an Omen for American Culture

So I was on vacation in Maine last week with some of my best friends. And as often happens among us geriatric millennials, the conversation turned to why everything is worse now than when it was in our teens and twenties, which I know is something that no middle-aged person has ever said about their youth. This was, I recognize, a totally original insight on our part.

One of the things that we lamented as we engaged in this cliché was the decline of adult comedies. We grew up on funny movies that became a part of our vocabulary:

• Old School
• 40 Year Old Virgin
• Anchorman
• Superbad
• Talladega Nights
• The Hangover
• Bridesmaids

I guarantee you, I have quoted each of these movies conservatively a hundred times in my life. Anchorman one-liners accounted for most of my social relations when I was a college freshman, which you should feel free to make any assumptions you wish about how popular I was when I was 18.

But as many people have noticed and mourned, the adult comedy barely exists as a genre anymore. It is genuinely difficult to name five big, popular mainstream original adult comedies in the last five years. Or ten years. Or fifteen years.

You can say the genre migrated to streaming TV, but it’s not as if there are so many spectacularly successful sitcoms there either. Or you could say it migrated to stand-up. What matters for my purposes here is: it’s gone. The adult comedy is gone. A comedic institution that lasted for decades just kind of died.

I was reminded of that conversation last week when CBS announced that it was canceling Stephen Colbert and The Late Show. I was listening on Monday as Bill Simmons made an interesting point that struck me as obviously true about this moment.

Comedians used to think of jobs like hosting a late-night show as the apex of their field. Now, nobody under 65 seems to watch the show live, and nobody under 50 seems to want the job.

Younger comedians today have totally different paths to success. They don’t want to make movies, sitcoms, or fill the shoes of a late-night host. No, they want to:

• Make stand-up specials: Just them, a stage, and a contract with Netflix.
• Make video podcasts: Just them, a mic, and YouTube.

Success in comedy today is more solitary than it used to be. You don’t have to join big organizations to get famous. You can just strike out on your own.

I don’t want to force a trend that doesn’t exist here, but I think you can see the resonance. The demise of the adult comedy and the demise of the late-night host are, to me, two pieces of the same story.

Comedians used to think that fame and fortune required joining big organizations, and now they’re finding both fame and fortune by working often alone, or alone-ish.

In comedy, as in so much of our culture and our economy, the age of institutions has handed off to the age of individuals. Today’s guest is Lucas Shaw, a reporter for Bloomberg and frequent commentator on The Town Podcast.

We talk about all of this:

• The cancellation of the Late Show
• The demise of late night
• The death of the Hollywood comedy
• The retreat of sitcoms on TV

But what I’m really after here is something that I think I’m still struggling to put into words. Why comedy as a field has become more of a solo business, and what that says about entertainment culture and society more broadly.

Lucas Shaw, welcome back to the show.
Great to be back. First time back, I think since you’re a best-selling author now, right? Do you have to add that in your title for all episodes?

I do not add that in my title for any episodes. That’s incredibly rude and gauche, and yet somehow I’m very grateful that you brought it up.

So I wanted to bring you on because I’m really interested in the cancellation of the Late Show in terms of what it says about television and comedy, and really more broadly, media entertainment.

And it seems to me like the interpretations for the cancellation of this show really broke down into three categories:

1. This was political. CBS did it to genuflect to the president as they’re looking forward to prepare for this merger.
2. It happened because Colbert isn’t very funny as the host of the Late Show. Conservatives, I think, preferred this point — that the show got woke, and this is yet another case of go woke, go broke.
3. And then the one that I’m mostly predisposed to believe is that this isn’t about politics. It’s not about cultural comedy. It’s about economics. This was a very expensive show. It cost too much money, and CBS, heading into this merger, wanted to save money.

Who or what do you think killed the Late Show?

So we’ll just dispense with the second one first, because it’s worth getting it out of the way. The go woke, go broke thing makes no sense here.

It was the highest rated of the late night shows. We can get into particulars around social views and all of that, but that really has nothing to do with it. Comedy is a matter of taste, but people at CBS are very proud of the show.

The show gets nominated for awards all the time. Stephen Colbert is objectively a talented comedian, whether you like him or not.

Anyways, I think the economic rationale is indisputable. You know, the ratings for late night have gone down pretty much every year. His show has held up better than some in part because the audience is so old.

But, you know, you think about from when he started to now, it’s lost at least a third of its audience. When he started, the audience for late night was already much smaller than it was.

The cost doesn’t really go down. Because, you know, he is a highly paid talent. He gets paid about $20 million a year. They have a lot of people working on it. There’s a full band, lots of writers, producers — all told about 200 people.

Whether we’re going to fully accept the numbers that people are putting out there — $40 million in losses this year, $50 million losses next year — that’s what people are saying. So I have to go with it.

There could be some classic Hollywood accounting in it, but there’s no way that this is a profitable show and it’s not a growing show. So it does make sense to want to cancel it for that reason.

At the same time, it is almost impossible for CBS to get the benefit of the doubt right now, given everything else that has happened around their Paramount merger with Skydance:

• Settling with what everyone considered a frivolous lawsuit with Donald Trump
• Everything that is coming out around David Ellison’s meetings with the chair of the FCC and the promises they’re making

There are all sorts of compromises and changes being made to satisfy the Trump administration to get this deal done. So even if politics had nothing to do with this decision, people don’t believe them when they say it.

I want to present not a conspiracy, but maybe like a little half conspiracy when it comes to the politics here:

Media companies are absolutely sucking up to Trump. I mean, that’s not a matter of opinion. That’s a matter of fact.

• Amazon buying the Melania doc
• Disney paying $15 million to Donald Trump to resolve the lawsuit over comments made by George Stephanopoulos

The president is absolutely using the power of the office to elicit payments and promises from media firms. Sometimes the threat of extortion can be convenient for companies. Companies sometimes like to have cover for cost cutting.

I remember during the Great Recession, it was practically a meme that big companies would hire McKinsey to do a strategic evaluation of, let’s say, Condé Nast. And then McKinsey comes in and they look at the company and they’re like:

"Hey, we're McKinsey. We're really smart consultants. We think you should..."

Cut 10% of your workforce. And the head of Condé Nast is like,
“Oh, lo and behold, it turns out I have to cut 10% of my workforce because McKinsey told me to.”

Or during the pandemic, when people used that as an excuse to make all sorts of changes to their business, some of which were completely legitimate and some of which were manufactured.

Precisely. And if Paramount wanted to make certain cuts to improve their profitability or just to make the company more ideologically culturally in line with the new owners and

“Oh, those cuts just happened to appease a president who we know is litigious and thin-skinned.”

Well, then you have a situation where the motivation of the cuts is, to your point, maybe 90% economic, but the appearance of the cuts, if it turns out that those are 90% political, well, that’s just fine. It’s fine. If the cuts seem political because it’s nice to have that sort of cover, that overlay, that excuse.

How do you feel about my sort of half conspiracy that CBS is allowing the political crackle to exist because it’s kind of a nice way to ensure that the president and a political FCC are going to approve a forthcoming merger?

It is a very fun contrarian theory. The problem with it, I guess, is in the case of the recession and the pandemic and some of these other sort of exogenous political circumstances, usually, they are convenient excuses for doing difficult things to try to soften the blow when you announce that you’re doing it.

In this case, it’s sort of the opposite, where because fans of Colbert are by and large not fans of Donald Trump, if you’re using kowtowing to the press, and they’re obviously not—they’ve explicitly said it’s not a political decision. But if you are sort of covertly helping to create this perception that you’re doing it for Trump, it doesn’t help you or benefit you in any way. It just alienates the Colbert viewers. So I don’t know how they gain from that.

This is an economic decision. Some media are reporting that it’s a political decision. It’s useful for CBS to have the Trump administration think that an economic decision is political because it makes it seem like

“They’re really trying so very hard to get this through and appease the president.”

That’s the half conspiracy.

I mean, sure. I think that’s fine. They were going to get, they were going to get… I think they knew that it would be perceived that way, no matter what. And so it would probably benefit them a little bit.

Important to note that the person who, one of the three Paramount CEOs, one who’s in charge of CBS, George Deeks, is the one who will stay at the new company. He certainly has a vested interest in ensuring that his new owners are happy with him and that the administration is happy with him because he’s not going anywhere.

One question I had is—I was hearing Matt Bell and he reported some of the numbers here:

• A hundred million dollar show, which is just unbelievable.
• Ad revenues plunging from—

Is it unbelievable?

Well, okay. Tell me why it’s believable.

Because a lot of people have responded negatively, like, “Oh my God, how can the show cost a hundred million dollars? It’s just a guy sitting behind a desk.”

But think about it: it’s a show that’s on every night, most of the year, and it costs about as much as one 10-episode show on Netflix. It doesn’t seem that crazy to me.

When you have, I guess people would be surprised to know that:

• There are 200 people working on it.
• Stephen Colbert gets paid $20 million a year.

When you have the band that he has with John Batiste, like, that’s not cheap. When you have some very experienced and probably reasonably well-paid writers, that adds up. When you have to film any stunts or skits or what they have to do for makeup or to help get people in to promote their stuff, there are just a lot of costs that add up.

I don’t find that number shocking.

Okay. Let’s assume the number is not shocking. Let’s assume the number is absolutely real. One thing I still don’t understand about this decision is: if it’s just about finances, why couldn’t the network just cut costs to keep the show in the air?

I know this question has been asked a lot, but I don’t think I’ve actually heard a satisfying answer.

You’ve got a show that’s bringing in tens of millions of dollars of ad revenue a year.

• In 2018, it brought in $121 million.
• That’s a $20 million profit just seven years ago. Why not just say the show as it currently exists is economically unsustainable, but the legacy could be profitable. We’re going to make some painful cuts. And oh, by the way, that could also be seen as useful to the president because it looks like we are chopping down to size a show that is ideologically predisposed to make fun of him all the time. Why not just cut?

You know, when I asked the folks at CBS that, the answer was that the losses are so significant that there was no way to cut to profit. And so why do it? That was the most satisfying answer than that.

I guess I would almost flip it and say, you might have to make those costs, but the other part of it that they struggled with, and I’m sure you want to get here, is like, why can they not make more money from the show’s existence elsewhere? Right? Because the show makes most of its money from advertising—and to, I mean, maybe they give it credit for some affiliate fees and stuff like that from linear television.

But as everybody knows, these late night shows are primarily consumed on the internet now. And we’re not talking about streaming on Paramount Plus. We’re talking about YouTube, we’re talking about Instagram. We’re talking about kind of fans around it. And there have to be innovative ways to make money from a property that people still like that can keep shows like this on the air.

Interestingly, I don’t think that’s a mystery at all. There’s the old cliché about how you’re trading sometimes the analog dollars for the digital pennies. But as you move attention from live television to YouTube, each impression gets so much less valuable.

The kind of shows that succeed on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok are not filmed in the Ed Sullivan Theater. They don’t have 200 employees. They don’t have—maybe they have a star making $20 million, but he or she is like the only person making over $500,000 in the entire group.

So this is what’s happening. What you’ve already described is that attention is moving from these enormously expensive institutions to these smaller solo proprietorships, these little podcasts, these little celebrity interview shows that are thriving on YouTube because they’re getting all these views without the burden of organizational infrastructure that 20th-century legacy shows have.

This is where I want to move. You wrote in your newsletter:

“Late night talk shows are dying and have been for a long time. The Late Show CBS is the first of the three major late night talk shows to call it quits. It won’t be the last.”

Why do you think it won’t be the last?

Because the numbers that we have seen and heard on this show are similar for all these other shows and the trend lines are the same.

• The audience is going down.
• The revenue is going down.
• The costs aren’t going down commensurate with those other metrics.

Eventually these media companies will decide it’s not worth it. The last one to go will probably be The Tonight Show because it has the longest history.

Fallon has the biggest audience on the internet. If I were to be uncharitable, I’d say of those three hosts, I think Fallon has the least clear path after that.

Jimmy Kimmel’s contract is, I believe, up the same time as Colbert next year. Would I be shocked if at some point in the next couple of months we heard that he wasn’t coming back? I wouldn’t be.

There’s a greater chance because he’s more woven into the fabric of Disney that they will maybe extend it for another year or two and they’ll find ways to save money. His show’s also not as expensive as Colbert’s. It’s not filmed at the Ed Sullivan Theater. It doesn’t have quite as big a staff.

I just think it’s inevitable that this particular type of late night topical talk show filmed in the theater with a big writing staff and band—the whole format—is a relic of the latter 20th, early 21st century.

And to your point about these kind of smaller, nimbler shops:

• If you asked anyone under 30 whether they spend more time watching Hot Ones or one of these late night shows, I would assume they spend more time watching Hot Ones.
• Or Chicken Shop Date.
• Or any number of these shows that take the interview format of celebrity and reinvent it for the internet.

It’s not the exact same format. There are parts of that topical humor that now exist in podcast form. There are parts of that, especially the interview part, that exist in podcast form but on YouTube.

It just has splintered, and there are many eras to it. And, and, and, and as you said, they’re the newer ones, the YouTube and podcast versions of these shows are far less expensive.

Another quote from your newsletter, which I thought was really important is that there’s not a long list of people who want to host these shows:

“Major comedians can now make more money and reach more people by touring and filming standup specials.”

What I’m hearing here, and Bill Simmons made this point as well with your friend, our friend, Matt Bellany on his Monday show, is that like in the 20th century, early 21st century, like to be a comedian meant to a certain extent to aspire toward having these kinds of jobs, toward being able to fill out these kinds of shoes.

And I think it also meant wanting to, you know, star in adult comedies, which is a trend line I also want to trace with you in a second. But nowadays comedians just find it much easier to make an enormous amount of money as sort of solo entrepreneurs, rather than a part of this like huge legacy organization.

Like that seems like a really important piece of this as well. That like, it’s not just that Netflix and CBS can’t make talk shows work. It’s also that the kind of people who would be excellent at these kinds of talk shows, if the year were 1975, now that the year is 2025, don’t actually want to do these jobs.

They want to be one man bands like Shane Gillis and do their own thing everywhere without being tied down to a big institution.

Yeah. If you were, I had an interesting conversation about this with Bert Kreischer, who’s a popular comedian, a couple of years ago, maybe last year. He was saying how at the start of his career, if you’d asked him where he wanted to be, it would have been:

• hosting a late night show
• starring in your own TV sitcom
• making your own movie

Those were sort of, those were sort of the three, the top of the pyramid for comedians.

Now he can make more money going on the road and then filming his tour for a Netflix special than he could from any of those. He’d have to take a pay cut to make a sitcom.

And that’s just a fundamental change in our media ecosystem that I don’t think is going back anytime soon.

So you would have:

• John Mulaney is not hosting the equivalent of a late night show on Netflix because of how it pays him.
• He’s hosting it because it’s the format that he loves and he wants to try it.
• And Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, is a huge comedy nerd and is totally willing to go with it even though nobody watches it.

But I, if you ask me, do I think that John Mulaney is going to be hosting that show for 20 years, like some of these people host a late night show?

I’d be shocked.

I want to go back to the comment that that comedian made because it so clearly makes the point that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since the Colbert news came out.

I really do see this as part of a larger story about the shift from institutions, entertainment to individuals, entertainment.

That is to say, if you wanted to become a star, it used to be the case that you had to move through institutions. But now in the age of fragmented media and the internet and YouTube and algorithmic media, it’s weirdly easier to become a star many times and in many ways, not by going through institutions, but rather by building this kind of one man band with a direct relationship to your audience.

And how do you, how do you define an institution in that case? I mean like a group, I mean like a group of dozens or hundreds of people, right?

You just told me the late night show has 200 people supporting Stephen Colbert.

That’s an institution, not only because it’s lasted for decades, but also because it employs a large group of people around a star.

And the name of the show is weirdly more significant than the star itself, right? You can have different hosts of The Tonight Show or The Late Show through the decades, but the show remains the same. The institution remains the same.

Like different people living in the same house.

So that, so I think of institutions as being both about:

• groups — about large groups of people required to make products
• but also brands that exist that are bigger than the individual, rather than the individual being bigger than the brand

Like, you know, you think about just something like a really, really obvious example: Mr. Beast doesn’t make sense to that Mr. Beast. Like, it doesn’t even make sense to say that sentence.

And so that is an individual, not an institution.

But so in the case, in the case of a couple of unpretested, so with Mr. Beast, so, but we’re not counting sort of YouTube as an institution.

No, no, that’s a platform.

Right. In the case of Hot Ones, would we count it because it was sort of birthed within First We Feast, which was part of Complex? That is an institution. It’s a small one, but it sort of came of age in a digital media institution, right? It is now since gone independent.

So, yes, I mean, look, there’s going to be some blurred lines here. But, I mean, you just look at the way that these shows are accessed. People don’t search for Stephen Colbert. They tune in at a specific time to CBS in order to see a spot that CBS is paying to Stephen Colbert, right?

He is almost like he’s being used to rent space within the CBS structure, rather than someone searching Mr. Beast to find their videos directly. That also seems like a distinction between institutions and individuals.

Yeah, well, I would argue that, and I don’t think you disagree, but they’re sort of stuck in the middle of this, right? So, when I was curious and wanted to look up for my newsletter, just for writing in general, the social followings of the different late night hosts, I went to YouTube and did not look up the late show. I looked up Stephen Colbert.

I think that they have become about the hosts and the institutions matter less and less, which is why it’s so important for their longevity and for the future of those ideas that you build around the talent. Unless you’ve created a brand that in some way outlives that, but I don’t think people watching online are now like that.

SNL is different. I do think people go and look up SNL because that is the brand. There are, every once in a while, performers on it who matter, but the brand is SNL. I think for those late night shows, the brand is now the host.

And so, you need those hosts and the affiliated show to be treated almost like they are a YouTube influencer.

I actually, in thinking about your really good question—and this is the nice thing about having a good journalist be the guest who sometimes becomes the host—I want to go back again to the interview that you had with that comedian. Remind me of his name?

Bert Kreischer.

He said:

“I used to want to be a talk show host, have my own sitcom or star in a comedy. Now I realize that I can just go on the road.”

That is actually the clearest example of what I’m trying to describe. He’s saying, I used to think that to become a star, I had to join a group. Whether that group was an already existing talk show, an enormous team of people putting on a sitcom, or an even more enormous team putting together an adult comedy.

But those aren’t the paths to success anymore.

The path to success now, he’s saying, is:

• Me with my United Frequent Flyer account
• Getting hired by a bunch of people
• Putting me in theaters
• Putting me in hotel rooms
• Then flying back home

That is a major difference in terms of interpersonal relations. What he’s saying is: I used to need to be around other people in order to become a star. Now I can make much more money essentially by myself.

And that strikes me as a trend that, yes, is about economics and media, but also, there’s something deeper here. It’s about society. And that’s why I think it’s so interesting.

Well, I would qualify that a little bit, only in so much as this: for those unfamiliar with his story, a big part of his success was, one, that he had a sort of a bit from a Showtime comedy special. The comedy special itself, I don’t think, did that well. But the bit went viral on the internet.

The other is, he is sort of an extended part of the Joe Rogan universe. Joe Rogan has helped propel a lot of stand-up comedians and other podcasts to fame. And he is not an institution in the traditional sense. It is more of an informal network of creators that sort of propel one another forward. So, it is decentralized, but there is still, in many ways, a core to it.

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This is slightly a tangent, but it’s a tangent I’m really interested in.

When the news that Colbert was eventually being let go by CBS broke, I had just had this long conversation with friends during a main vacation about the decline of adult comedies.

We’re a bunch of men and women in our late 30s. So take this for what it is.

When we grew up, this was the beginning of the Judd Apatow universe. We watched and quoted old school:

• Anchorman
• 40-Year-Old Virgin
• Superbad

These movies were our lexicon.

“Throw in Wedding Crashers, even though it wasn’t a Judd Apatow movie.”
“Yeah, exactly. The Hangover.”

Before I force a connection here between these two developments—the Late Show cancellation and the demise of the adult comedy—I would actually really love to understand your expert opinion on why these kinds of movies aren’t made anymore.

I know this is something that’s been talked about a lot, but maybe some kind of consensus has settled in the industry that explains why, if you go back over the last 5 to 15 years, it’s actually very difficult to build a Mount Rushmore of influential adult comedies that people go to each other anymore.

Yeah, it’s really unfortunate. What happened? What is the movie that I’m going to watch after a long week on a Friday night when I just want to turn my brain off and laugh? You end up having to go back to the 2000s instead of the 2010s.

I think the simplest answer, which is different from one related to some of what we’re talking about, is the globalization of the movie business.

• Studios are going for massive blockbusters that work all over the world.
• Comedy is generally local.
• Certain comedians work everywhere (big stand-ups touring globally), but by and large, comedies tend to be more localized.

If you’re looking for a movie that’s going to make 400, 500, 600, 700 million worldwide, there are very few comedies. The Hangover is one of the only ones that’s ever done it. So I think that’s probably the biggest factor.

Some of it might also be that:

• Up-and-coming comedians are coming from outside the Hollywood system.
• They’re getting famous on YouTube or podcasts.
• It’s not clear the skills that make someone really funny and successful there translate to the cinematic medium.

The one that probably has the most direct connection to what we’re talking about is just the loss of common culture, which makes it harder.

Comedy is such a shared experience. You want to go to a theater and laugh together. You need shared references. We just don’t have as much of that. So it’s harder to find things that bond and bind people together.

I really like those explanations. I want to fold in domestic consumer behavior as well. Like, how to say this best?

It just seems like the typical American buys what? Three movie tickets a year? Like three and a half? It’s around there.

It seems like we collectively are reserving those tickets for blockbusters. Then we’ve almost been implicitly trained by Hollywood to reserve those tickets… For the Oppenheimers, the Barbies, and the Marvels, in a world where we’re holding onto that ticket until there’s either a big franchise event or just like a really sui generis breakout hit like Sinners, right? That is not based on any IP, but just becomes its own micro phenomenon.

Outside of those things, nothing seems to crack $70 million anymore. That seems to me to speak to not just changes in, yes, everything you said — the globalization of the movie business — but also changes in American audiences. They see different movies, donate their money to different kinds of films now than they did 20 years ago. Hollywood is going to see that message and respond to it.

How do you feel about that?

No, I think it’s a really good point. The movie business has become an event business. It used to be a habit business where people would just go to the theater on a Friday and some wouldn’t decide what to see until they got there. Now you pretty much only go to the theater to see something in particular.

As televisions at home have gotten better, and entertainment options at home have gotten more plentiful, people are only going to the theater for something that they feel like they have to see, something that merits being on the big screen, something that merits them leaving their house. There’s just too much they can watch and laugh at at home.

I’m personally mystified by why horror has navigated this transition better than comedy. I would say that neither one of them is about the quality of cinematography or visual effects or anything like that—something that needs to be seen in the theater on a big screen. But the reason to go and see them in a theater is because they are both communal experiences, one out of fear and one out of kind of laughter and delight.

For some reason, there is a little more of an emphasis feeling that you should go and be scared together than you should go and laugh together. I’m always confused by that.

I think it helps that horror movies are cheaper than comedy movies by and large. If people could make a bunch of comedies for $5 million, maybe we’d be having a different conversation. But horror has generally held up better than comedy in theaters.

That is really interesting. I never thought about that. I’m actually curious what your theories are for why horror would hold up better than comedy.

My guess, as you were talking, is that horror is spectacle in a way that comedy is not. Some of my favorite comedies are kind of quiet comedies — awkward comedies. That’s simply a matter of taste.

But there’s nothing spectacular about awkward comedies. The humor almost exists entirely within you rather than being shared with people laughing hysterically at crazy antics. Whereas horror demands to be expressed. It demands to be externalized.

So there is something about being in an audience around other people.

There’s also something I think about watching. People sometimes are afraid to watch horror alone and less afraid to watch horror with other people. So there’s something about the genre of horror that has a collective function of safety when you’re watching it with other people.

Especially because horror tends to over-index a little bit with women. Maybe I’m confusing horror and true crime. But I feel like there is something about that.

But you’re right that if you’re going to be scared, it’s more fun to laugh with other people. But it’s very comfortable to sit and laugh at home. It’s not as comfortable to sit and be petrified in your own home, especially if you’re alone.

Well, the other thing I guess I’ve been thinking about is, because you were talking, we were talking about the kind of societal role of the theater and when and why you go to the movie theater.

One of the reasons is certainly that you can entertain yourself more at home. But I find it interesting that it’s not just film comedies that are in decline. It’s also television comedy.

If you look at Nielsen’s recent data for the most watched streaming shows of the first half of the year:

• The acquired shows, basically reruns, are filled with comedies like:
  • Family Guy
  • Bob’s Burgers
  • South Park
  • Young Sheldon
  • Friends
    All the big shows from the 90s and aughts.
• If you look at the original shows, there are no comedies.

That’s so interesting.

There’s this meme that all these Gen Z-ers are still watching Friends and The Office because nothing’s been made in the last 20 years.

But there isn’t really a new sitcom — except maybe Ted Lasso. So a lot of the most popular comedic quotes today come from shows that are not strictly comedies, like The Bear, which is not really a comedy. The Max is a comedy.
The White Lotus is a comedy-ish. Like there’s a lot of these things that are comedy and drama. And I, people assume that after the success of Ted Lasso, every streaming service was going to say,

“we need our own Ted Lasso.”

Well, where are they? Is it just that people aren’t watching the sitcoms? They can’t find the right thing? Whatever it is, there are not a bunch of new sitcoms working. And so I, I think it’s something that happened, is happening across Hollywood.

Yeah. You, you triggered a couple thoughts here. One is which, one of which is that, um, you know, I had this, the last chapter of my book Hitmakers was called Empires and City-States. And I said, you know, one vision of the future of entertainment is that certain kinds of media will just get bigger and bigger and bigger. Those are the empires. And then certain kinds of media will just get smaller and smaller and smaller. And those are the city-states.

And listening to you, again, and this is just coming together for me for the first time right now, movies are becoming empires and comedy is becoming a city-state. Like, movies are getting bigger and bigger. Like, that market is globalizing. And some of that is about marketing costs and some of it is about labor costs. But there are a lot of pressures moving movies to become bigger global businesses.

And meanwhile, comedy in a lot of ways is just getting smaller. It’s not that there’s no comedy on the internet. That’d be ridiculous to say, but comedy movies don’t really exist the way they did 15 years ago. Comedy sitcoms don’t really exist. Popular sitcoms don’t really exist the way they did 15, 20 years ago.

To the extent that comedy exists, it exists, again, at a very, like, individuated level. It’s smaller. It’s direct. It’s individuals. It’s more narrowly targeted. It’s often, like, more political because if you’re just talking to your own audience, you don’t have to worry about offending people, right? It’s your audience. You can be more conspiratorial. Again, you don’t have to worry about offending people.

And that means that, like, it’s harder to have mainstream comedy if the evolution of that market is going toward individual comedians talking to individual audiences in a relatively intimate way. Or just memes.

I mean, to tie it back to Colbert, right? So the biggest topic on the internet last week was the Coldplay concert where the CEO and the employee and everyone is going to know what I’m talking about. Which, by the way, can we pause there? It’s amazing that everybody knows what you’re talking about. Like, it is amazing when, as fragmented as our culture is, we have this, like, little tiny moment that comes to us from the past. That everybody knows about.

That somehow, I was at a high school friend’s 40th birthday. And a friend of mine from high school who, like, lives in Brooklyn, teaches in Brooklyn, I just launched into a conversation about this Coldplay concert. I haven’t spoken to this guy for 10 years. I just assumed, well, of course, somehow this information would have got to you.

So it is just funny how, like, once every, like, six months, there’s an event that just somehow cuts through the fragmentation and becomes this little tiny vestige of the mainstream. And then it dies. And we, you know, go back to fragmentation again. It’s just weird.

It’s totally, and I brought it up because Colbert did something on it by the, you know, I think the next day. But by that point, it used to be that if you wanted to, first of all, if something like that happened, you might not even know, you wouldn’t really know about it until someone made a joke about it on late night, right? Like, they would have folks scouring the country for fun little local things to talk about that you would shine a light on.

Instead, by the time Colbert talks about it and ropes in Jon Stewart and Jon Oliver and all these people to have fun with it, there have been millions of memes on the internet. There have been a ton of podcasts that have talked about it. There’s just been so much media about it that there’s nothing special about Colbert doing something. You have to, like, really nail the bit. And even if you nail the bit, it’s not the only way, it’s probably not the thing that people remember about that moment.

And that is one of the reasons why late night is considerably less relevant than it used to be. And it’s also one of the reasons why I think one of the greatest ironies of this moment is that Stephen Colbert is going to be much better and funnier when he moves in the direction that comedy is moving, which is toward a guy and a mic being himself for an audience.

I always felt like he was a, he was always a little bit of an awkward fit for this kind of like super like tie-up comedian that you have to be if you’re doing a late night show. That is theoretically purportedly speaking to like a hundred million Americans at once, even though it’s only talking to two million Americans at a time.

He’s going to be so much better at being the kind of comedian that this age rewards—just like weird and talented and narrow and focused and specific and not trying to pretend to be, you know, keeping this vestige of 20th-century mainstream culture alive.

So, what would you see him doing a year from now?
Oh, he’ll be, he’ll be, you know, Amy Poehler.

He’ll be hosting a podcast.
He’ll be hosting like an irreverent podcast that has him maybe blending a little bit of like character acting because he’s obviously so good at that.

He’s an extraordinary improviser and I don’t think you can really, I mean, like as a comedian, he’s an extraordinary improvisational comedian.

And I think it’s hard to really let that freak flag fly at whatever 10:30 PM on CBS at the Ed Sullivan Theater. The pomp and circumstance of that show doesn’t fit. I think his style—he’s weirder than it.

And I think his weirdness will actually be perfect for the thing that he does next. Whatever it is.

Like it goes, it, I guess it, it is to say that while there’s aspects of this sort of transition between institutions and individuals that I kind of bemoan, there’s parts of it that are like, so obviously wonderful, you know, more creation, more creativity.

And I think the irony here is that five years from now, we’ll think that this is one of the best things to happen to Stephen Colbert.

Okay. So you adopt, a lot of people seem to be adopting this belief that it’s the best thing to happen to him. Probably look, maybe not his bank account—$20 million is a lot to make in a year. I’m not worried about his bank account.

He hosted that show for nine, ten years. He hosted The Colbert Report for a long time. He’s fine. He’s been, yeah, he’ll be fine.

It’s, you know, I guess in a weird way, a good thing if you believe he was destined for that show to be canceled or end in the near future anyways. Doing so in a way where he comes out looking like a martyr and a hero is probably a good thing.

And it gives, and the way it’s also been structured is he has time to figure out what to do.

So, yeah, I know you’re right. There is something kind of interesting about how martyr culture is an important ingredient in modern entertainment success.

Like Shane Gillis was better off being fired by SNL than hired by SNL, and maybe only in the 2020s could that be the case given all the things that he can do in the ways that he can go directly to audiences.

But I think you put your finger on something quite important about how a little dose of martyrdom can go a long way in modern media.

Oh, I think it, I mean, not to keep it all in the ringer family or talk out of school or anything.

Like he leaves The Hollywood Reporter under this cloud where the owners of it wanted to influence the journalism.

And so instead of having to leave at a certain point cause the magazine is losing money and it’s firing people and it just looks like a failing thing, he chooses to get out.

He basically, you know, he leaves as the hero of the story and it paves the way for whatever he wants to do next.

I totally think it helped him.

Well, and The Ringer itself probably would not exist if someone had not shut down Grantland.

Yes. I don’t know if Bill came out as the martyr. I guess he came out as the martyr there.

Yeah.

Well, I think to bring it back to the top point, this is a really interesting moment for comedy. And I think it’s really interesting the degree to which a lot of these contours that we see in the comedy market—the sort of miniaturization of the field as comedians go from wanting the biggest possible platform to a smaller platform, the fact that it’s becoming more tailored, the fact that it’s becoming more political—it’s just interesting how many of these trends seem to mimic and retrace things I’m seeing across media and entertainment.

So we’ll leave it there.

Lucas Shaw. Thank you very much.
Thanks, Eric.

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