From Johnny Carson to Stephen Colbert: Late-night TV's glorious past, rocky present, uncertain future

Bill Scheft worked on David Letterman's late-night shows longer than many of their viewers had been on the planet — 24 years, or the second-longest tenure of any writer at CBS's "Late Show" or NBC's "Late Night." Over the decades he wrote thousands of monologue jokes and once threw a watermelon from the top of the Ed Sullivan Theater down to 53rd Street below. Never a dull moment, with all the variety, melons, guests, with Dave, and especially with the sense that you were working on the greatest late-night show in the greatest theater in the greatest city on earth.

Not quite retired, Scheft still writes jokes by the bushel for any comic who needs them quickly, and plays drums for a band called the Truants. He has written six novels, too. Like most other New Yorkers, Scheft has also kept up with the travails of late night, in particular "Late Show with Stephen Colbert."

"My gut reaction when I heard the news was that even though the timing was greasy — we'll say — it was not a surprise to me," he says.

That "news" was the July 18 announcement that "Late Show" would wrap next spring, and that CBS was abandoning a time period that it had spent so much of its TV history trying to break into. From an examination of his own viewing habits, Scheft knew something was wrong long before then. Over the past few years, to "watch late-night TV" for millions had devolved from actually watching, to sampling, to checking out a clip on YouTube or TikTok. Or ignoring late-night altogether.

Something had to give, although Scheft is still trying to wrap his head around the fact that TV's most-viewed (2.4 million) show where he spent so many happy years is the one that gave.

He's hardly alone in his bewilderment. Samantha Bee — her own late show, "Full Frontal," a victim of viewer and network caprice in 2022 — said on a recent podcast with fellow comedian Tom Papa that "people are just not tuning in" to the genre any more.

"They are literally on their phones all the time [and] they'd rather watch people murder each other in a South Korean game show before nodding off."

Ten years ago when "Colbert" launched, this was a flourishing genre, with a dozen late-nighters on the air. By the early 1990s, this was TV's most exciting genre, with the Letterman-vs.-Leno wars in full tabloid uproar. And for a nearly unbroken stretch of 30 years leading up to that, just one name, one man — Johnny Carson — commanded late-night as none had before. Or since.

Late-night seemed forever. But "forever" just hit a wall.

"This is a dying format and it's been dying for years," says Jeffrey Cole, director of the Center for the Digital Future at University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. "I give [Jimmy] Kimmel two years tops, but I think 'Tonight' survives because that's the DNA of NBC and [pioneering NBC chief] Pat Weaver's legacy. It's also set up to be a digital-adjacent show. Maybe we're entering the era of the hard edge of Kimmel and Colbert leading into the softer, nicer edge of ['Tonight' host Jimmy] Fallon."

Could both things be true?

So, was Colbert's demise strictly a political or strictly financial move? Was "Colbert" dumped over pressure — real or implied — from late night's leading anti-fan, President Donald Trump, or because it had turned into a financial albatross?

Or could both things be true, creating a storm so perfect that it swamped TV's top-rated late-night show when no one even saw the storm approaching, and now threatens to swamp the others? 

 At the very least, the timing is suspect, or "greasy," as Scheft puts it. Colbert's "Late Show" was canceled 15 days after the network paid $16 million toward Trump's future presidential library, settling what many believed to be a frivolous lawsuit over a "60 Minutes" interview ("A big fat bribe," as Colbert told his audience). Less than two weeks later, on Aug. 7, CBS parent Paramount was absorbed by Skydance — a long-delayed merger that needed the approval of at least one major agency under direct White House control, the Federal Communications Commission. 

CBS has, of course, denied that Trump pressure had anything to do with this. Company president George Cheeks, told reporters at an Aug. 7 press conference: "At the end of the day, ['Late Show'] just wasn’t sustainable to continue."

But the next day, David Ellison — Cheeks' boss, and the chairman of CBS' new owner, Paramount Skydance — told CNBC's David Faber, "Our No. 1 job is to entertain and inspire audiences around the world. And with respect, I don't believe that means that they want us to inject politics into everything we do. I actually think they want the opposite. ... We don't intend to politicize the company."

"Late Show" — the most overtly political show on CBS — is scheduled to end in May.

But could both things be true? According to industry observers — including Cole, who lives a few blocks from the Ed Sullivan Theater, and believes they are — CBS has been trying to sell the building that houses the theater for at least two years. "They've been trying to unload anything that's not nailed down," Cole says. That includes Los Angeles' iconic CBS Television City, which sold in 2018 for $750 million.

Nevertheless, CBS seemed to have made little effort to save the building's chief tenant. Vincent Favale, CBS' former chief of late night who ran both Colbert's and Letterman's "Late Show," said in a phone interview that "if you [CBS] wanted the show, it could be saved. It's almost an indictment on CBS themselves — one of your brands is the No. 1 in the category and you're going to eliminate that brand because you're not making money in that two-hour [late-night] chunk of time!"

Favale adds, "Why didn't they say to Stephen that the salad days are over and you need to take a healthy pay cut and move to a smaller theater so we can maximize profits? The audience doesn't care if it's in the Ed Sullivan Theater. It's shocking that this guy delivered the No. 1 show every night, fought the good fight, and then got canceled."

By most accounts — which Favale confirms — Colbert was shocked, too. He arrived back from vacation in mid-July only to learn that his 10-year run had ended, with no forewarning.

Yet how that was possible leads to more questions. The late-night business model has been broken for years — no secret there — while CBS' own model has effectively been gutted. When "The Late Late Show with James Corden" ended in 2023, it was replaced with "After Midnight," with Taylor Tomlinson. When her run ended in June, CBS threw in the towel on a time period it has programmed since Jan. 9, 1995, when Tom Snyder became the first host of "The Late Late Show."

(New episodes of the long-running syndicated show Byron Allen's "Comics Unleashed" will air after "Late Show" leading up to the swan song, and some believe that if those get traction, it'll move to 11:35.)

Jim Bell, a veteran NBC producer who ran "The Tonight Show" in the late 2010s, says he doesn't buy the "both things could be true" line because "it's more a question of the math, not the politics."

"Anytime you see these mergers and acquisitions there's quite often a clean-up-in-aisle-seven situation when it comes to accounting. You've got something that's hemorrhaging money and you want to tidy that up."

Anytime you see these mergers and acquisitions there's quite often a clean-up-in-aisle-seven situation when it comes to accounting. You've got something that's hemorrhaging money and you want to tidy that up.

— Jim Bell, a veteran NBC producer who ran The Tonight Show in the late 2010s

Bell — now senior vice president of media for the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games  — adds: "It's fair to say that even five years ago the math wasn't 'mathing,' and there was not a lot in terms of viewer behavior that indicated there was any kind of solution readily available beyond things like 'we'll air more repeats' or do just four shows a week. There are some things that can be done in the margins, but you see the writing on the wall. I understand why the decision was made at CBS. Instead of a nick here and a nick there, they just decided 'let's call it now.' "

The beginning of the end

To understand how late-night TV got to this point is as simple as looking at your own media habits — or better still, the habits of a 25-year-old. When was the last time you (or they) stayed up five nights a week, until 12:35 a.m., to sit through a monologue, guest chat segment and 22 minutes of commercials?

Nielsen, the audience measurement service, insists some people actually do. An average of 5.4 million people watched these shows during the spring (compared to 7.3 million just before the pandemic), but even this number is squishy because it includes people who watched on DVR, or a streaming service during a seven-day stretch. The networks do not break out the "live" rating, or the one that reveals how many actually stayed up to watch. (You can easily guess why.)

In fact, the bulk of viewing now takes place on YouTube, Instagram and name-a-service. That's why monologues are so important along with those glossy pre-produced bits that play so well on TikTok. How the shows actually make money from all these streams is one of TV's great guessing games — but you can be reasonably certain it's not nearly enough. "Late Show" loses about $40 million per year, according to a figure CBS has privately shopped to a few reporters. Where did all that money disappear to? One wild guess — salaries, or Colbert's in particular (probably in the $15 million-$20 million per year range), and those of some 200 other staffers, many locked into the union contracts of three major guilds.

There may be no substitute to shooting a hit late-night show on Broadway, but no way around the costs, either.

Late-night's decline and fall began where all declines begin — at the top, when post-11:30 TV was consumed in one massive nationwide gulp. Over a three-decade span, there were few regional, demographic or political fault lines anywhere on TV but there were none whatsoever on late-night. Beginning Oct. 1, 1962, "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" was a TV nation's singular habit, with about 17 million regular viewers in the 1970s. (Fifty million watched the May 22, 1992, finale.) "The Dick Cavett Show" did mount a threat during its ABC run (1969-75) but mass popularity did not follow critical regard.

Then several things began to happen, almost at once. Foremost, Carson wanted more time off. He negotiated a three-night work week, starting in 1981 and the show shrank from 90 minutes to one hour. To avoid reruns, NBC, with Carson's blessing, slotted guest hosts, like Jay Leno and Joan Rivers. The post-Carson landscape began to take shape.

In 1987, Nielsen began the so-called "people meter," to determine what sorts of people were watching. Advertisers wanted youth, and Nielsen pointed the way — largely to late-night. With a demonstration of just how important the cultural cachet of late-night was, the new Fox network launched with "The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers" in 1986. Arriving in syndication in 1989, "The Arsenio Hall Show" was an instant sensation, by attracting members of the MTV Generation and a group of viewers who'd never had a late-night show to call their own — young and Black. Cracks began to appear in the "Carson" hegemony, then widened.

Mark Malkoff, a comic and host of "The Carson Podcast," says he interviewed some 400 people for his upcoming book ("Love Johnny Carson: One Obsessive Fan's Journey to Find the Genius Behind the Legend," Dutton, Oct. 21). Some of them told him Carson wanted out while the getting was good: "There were so many cooks coming into the kitchen [and] he wanted to go out strong while he still could. He always prided himself on timing."

The 1990s and 2000s saw a boom in late-night with a dozen new shows and wannabe Carsons — among them Whoopi Goldberg, Dennis Miller, Jon Stewart, Howard Stern and Chevy Chase. A shakeout was inevitable. 

Decline and fall

The exact date of the beginning of the end is easy to pinpoint — Feb. 14, 2005, with the birth of YouTube. By early the following year, fans had begun to upload clips from the late-night shows — monologues, guests, bits, whatever they could scrounge.

A new habit was born, but by the time the networks started to crack down in 2007, it was too late. Their most devoted and important late-night fans — the beer-and-bong set, young, male, and digital natives — had discovered the work-around. Late-night would never again be "late-night," but "next morning," or "whenever you want." By 2025, the rest of the world has caught up.

Much else has led to the fragmentation, including the networks' own free-fall, while Leno — who rode out the decline for decades — has frequently criticized late-night's great political divide. He told the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation in a recent podcast that "I got hate letters saying, ‘You and your Republican friends,’ and another saying, ‘I hope you and your Democratic buddies are happy’ — over the same joke. That’s how you get a whole audience. Now you have to be content with half the audience, because you have to give your opinion."

That certainly sounds plausible, except what's a "whole audience" anyway? Has there even been one of those since Carson? Any of the three late-night guys would be thrilled with "half the audience" when they barely can muster a vanishing fraction of it. 

Gerard Mulligan, a longtime on-air "Late Night"/"Late Show" regular and writer says, "It's a sad thing because I don't know if people really understand the magnitude of Carson and his 17 million people a night. I mean wow, just wow. You can't imagine how impactful that was, that Johnny would tell a joke one night and the next day we'd all repeat it. But everything's so fragmented now. Kids don't buy an album but buy a 'cut,' and I tell my daughter I saw a very funny bit last night on Seth Meyers' [Late Show] and she says. 'Oh, I'll watch it on YouTube.'

It's a sad thing because I don't know if people really understand the magnitude of Carson and his 17 million people a night. I mean wow, just wow. You can't imagine how impactful that was, that Johnny would tell a joke one night and the next day we'd all repeat it.

— Gerard Mulligan, a longtime on-air Late Night/Late Show regular and writer

"I feel the same way I felt when David stepped down and the next week" CBS began to gut the theater in preparation for the new host. "We had all these expensive suede seats torn out of the Ed Sullivan Theater, and thrown out on 53rd Street." 

Mulligan's former colleague and friend Bill Scheft adds, "I'm not worried about Stephen — he's gonna be fine wherever he lands — but it really is sad because I know a lot of people on that show, and I'm really fond of them. They do really good work. And that's the thing that just stinks."