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    A rightwing late-night show may have bombed – but the funding behind it is no laughing matter

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    A group of conservative donors spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a rightwing version of late-night talkshows like the Tonight Show and the Late Show, leaked documents reveal, in a further indication of the right’s ongoing efforts to overhaul American culture.News of the effort to pump conservative viewpoints into the mainstream comes as entertainment shows and the media at large are under severe threat in the US. In September, Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was taken off the air, under pressure from the Trump administration, after Kimmel’s comments after the killing of Charlie Kirk, while Donald Trump has launched multiple lawsuits against TV networks and news organizations.Four pilot episodes, each of which has been watched by the Guardian, were made of the rightwing chatshow. It was promoted by the Ziklag group, a secretive Christian nationalist organization, which aims to reshape culture to match its version of Christianity. In an email in 2022, Ziklag – which ProPublica reported spent $12m to elect Trump last year – urged its members to stump up money for the project, called the Talk Show With Eric Metaxas.“For too long, the late-night talkers on network tv have filled the airwaves with progressive rants and outright mockery of anyone who espouses traditional American values,” the Ziklag email read.The Talk Show With Eric Metaxas, Ziklag wrote, will “change that forever”. The email said the show needed $400,000 to $500,000 to film five pilot episodes, “which will be presented to digital distributors, networks and tv ownership groups”.The Guardian sat through nearly four hours of the Talk Show, and found it to be an almost exact copy of existing late-night shows, just worse: with hack jokes about tired issues and has-been, conservative guests. The show was never picked up, presumably to the chagrin of Ziklag and its investors, who had lofty expectations.Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 video. Here is a link to the video instead.“Spoiler alert! The secular elites who currently reign over late-night tv are about to find out the joke’s on them!” Ziklag’s pitch email read. It lauded Metaxas, a conservative radio host and author who was an eager proponent of the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen, claiming: “His comedic bent has gone largely unnoticed until now that is…”Unfortunately, across the four pilots, Metaxas’s comedic bent was noticeable only by its absence.“Big news in the world of show business,” Metaxas began the first episode. “Harrison Ford will be returning for a fifth Indiana Jones movie. Yeah. In this one Harrison will find an ancient artifact … by looking in the mirror.”There were a few titters from the audience, and scattered applause. Metaxas, appearing nervous, continued with the one-liners:“Barbie’s longtime companion, Ken, just turned 61 years old. Yeah. And he said the perfect gift for his birthday would be to finally get a prostate.”This time there were some audible groans. Metaxas stuck at it.“In India, doctors removed 526 teeth from a seven-year-old boy’s mouth,” he chortled. “The boy is recovering nicely. However, the Tooth Fairy declared bankruptcy.”Ziklag claimed the show would welcome “guests who are routinely shadow banned on other talk shows”, and quoted Metaxas as saying: “It’s kind of like Stalin has air-brushed these people out of the culture.”But the common theme among the guests was that they had been naturally phased out of existing talkshows due to their irrelevance.The first episode featured an exclusive interview with Carrot Top, the 60-year-old prop comedian. Carrot Top showed Metaxas some of his props, including a bottle of Bud Light that had a torch in the bottom of it and a dinner plate that had a hole in it. Carrot Top managed to say absolutely nothing of interest during the three-minute tête-à-tête, before Metaxas cut back to the studio.“Tonight’s show is loaded with talent,” Metaxas announced to the live audience. The guests included a TikToker – “for our generation, Tic Tac was a breath mint”, Metaxas quipped – Tammy Pescatelli, a comedian who has been absent from the limelight for at least a decade; and Danny Bonaduce, best known for his work on the 1970s sitcom the Partridge Family.Throughout the episodes – as Metaxas sang a song with a terrified-looking Victoria Jackson, a self-described conservative Christian who was a cast member on Saturday Night Live from 1986 to 1992 and has claimed Barack Obama is an “Islamic terrorist” – and as he continued with awful jokes about some scientists who had developed a robot that could build furniture but “cannot promise that the robot won’t swear”, it was hard to see what the point of this was.In its email, Ziklag said it was offering the opportunity to invest as part of the “Media Mountain”, a reference to the Seven Mountain Mandate, a theology popular among the Christian right. The theology proposes that Christians should seek to take over seven spheres of influence in public life: religion, the government, the media, education, culture, entertainment and business.Chris Himes, who produced the Talk Show, said the show was not intended to be a “rightwing late-night show”. The aim, Himes said, was “to create a broad, throwback late-night program for the entire country – not just one side”.“These are not partisan or ‘right-wing’ shows. Think Letterman or Dick Cavett in tone: humor first, with no space for snark or ‘clapter’,” he said in an email.“Sadly, much of late night over the past decade has shifted from being genuinely funny to becoming a vehicle for tribal signaling – even occasionally straying into messaging far beyond comedy. We believe the country deserves something better.”Himes added: “To be clear, a ‘right-wing’ late-night show would be a terrible idea. What we’re building is something more essential: a genuinely funny, unifying alternative.”In the pilot episodes, there were guests who were known for rightwing politics, but Metaxas largely didn’t ask them about those politics. In episode three, he seemed to decide he needed to at least say a bit of something to satisfy the rightwing donors funding this enterprise, but that came in the form of going over well-trodden ground about liberals.“Botanists have discovered a meat-eating plant in Canada,” Metaxas said in his intro. “Researchers determined that the plant started eating meat because it just got tired of explaining its vegan lifestyle.”He continued: “Detroit’s sanitation workers – I just read this – they’re threatening to go on strike. Detroit’s mayor said not to worry, because Detroit will continue to look and smell exactly the same.”Another quip ventured into current affairs: “Gas costs a fortune. It’s insane how much it costs. And who would have thought that the best deal at the Shell station would ever be the $3 microwave burrito?”Ziklag’s pitch to investors had promised big-name guests. It didn’t deliver apart from an interview – heavily touted by Metaxas – with film-maker Ron Howard. The interview turned out to be from a press junket, where directors or actors sit in a room for eight hours and basically anyone with a press pass can schedule time to question them.It’s unlikely Howard knew he was appearing on what Ziklag described as a “faith-friendly, late night alternative”, but that’s perhaps irrelevant, given networks clearly passed on what is a confused, drab copy of shows that are actually successful.But while Metaxas’s effort to shoehorn a conservative show into the mainstream may have been lamentable, the fact that wealthy rightwingers are attempting to do so should be cause for concern, given the threat television is under from Trump.Earlier this year, CBS scrapped the Late Show with Stephen Colbert – Colbert had repeatedly mocked Trump – weeks after CBS’s parent company settled a lawsuit with Trump. Trump has also called for late-night show hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, who have both criticized the president, to be fired, while the president has overseen NPR and PBS being stripped of funding, having decried “biased media”.The Talk Show was a terrible product, memorable only for dreadful humor and snooze-inducing interviews. In the current climate, however, it serves as a reminder that the right wing is waging a well-funded war on the media that is unlikely to end soon. More

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      Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Only Donald Trump would try to prove he wasn’t threatening ABC by threatening ABC’

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      Late-show hosts discuss Jimmy Kimmel’s record-breaking return to air and Donald Trump’s escalator snafu at the United Nations.Jimmy KimmelAfter breaking his own YouTube monologue record and attracting 6.2 million broadcast viewers on Tuesday night, Kimmel celebrated the fact that his show returned again on Wednesday – at least, “for most of the country”, as Jimmy Kimmel Live! remained off the air for a number of ABC affiliates, including channels in Seattle, Washington DC, Nashville, New Orleans, St Louis and elsewhere.“Thank God they’re not pre-empting the new season of The Golden Bachelor because of this,” he joked, referring to his suspension by ABC owner Disney under pressure from the Trump administration. “The FCC might not like jokes about the president, but they are still very OK with Poppop getting a squeezer in a Jacuzzi, and I think we can be very grateful for that.“A lot of people watched our show last night,” he continued. “I got so many texts from so many people – it made me realize how many of my friends are never watching the show at any other time.”That included “one very special friend” – Trump, Kimmel’s beloved “mad red hatter”, who wrote on Truth Social hours before Kimmel aired: “I can’t believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his ‘talent’ was never there.”“You can’t believe they gave me my job back?” Kimmel mused. “I can’t believe we gave you your job back.”Trump continued: “I think we’re going to test ABC out on this. Let’s see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers!”Kimmel fired back: “There’s the threat again, this time straight from FCC-biscuit’s mouth. Only Donald Trump would try to prove he wasn’t threatening ABC by threatening ABC.“You almost have to feel sorry for the people who work for him, who try to clean up the messes,” he added. “They go to all these lengths to say, ‘Oh, it wasn’t coercion! The president was just musing!’ And then the second Trump is alone, he sits on the toilet, he gets his grubby little thumbs on his phone, and he immediately blows their excuses to smithereens, and says it was ratings that got me fired.”Trump ended his Truth Social rant with: “Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad ratings.”“And he does know bad ratings. He has some of the worst ratings any president has ever had,” Kimmel laughed, referring to Trump’s record-low poll numbers. “So on behalf of all of us, welcome to the crappy ratings club, Mr President.”Late in the monologue, Kimmel offered an explanation to his critics for his continued focus on Trump. “I talk about Trump more than anything because he’s a bully. I don’t like bullies – I played the clarinet in high school.” And Trump, he said, was “an old-fashioned, 80s movie-style bully”.Backing Trump was like “rooting for Biff from Back to the Future”, he added, referring to the villain of the 1985 film. “I don’t know about you, I’m with Marty McFly.”Stephen ColbertStephen Colbert opened Wednesday’s Late Show monologue in a good mood, “because last night our good friend Jimmy Kimmel returned to television”.“Jimmy spoke beautifully about free speech and unity,” he said. “He made great jokes, showed his deep emotions, got huge ratings.”But “that wasn’t the only victory for free speech yesterday”, as a statue depicting Trump and Jeffrey Epstein skipping and holding hands was placed on the National Mall. “It’s a lovely piece, but I’ve gotta say, not very realistic – Trump can’t stand on one leg, not with those cankles!” Colbert joked. “It would be like trying to balance on a sock full of overripe honeydew.”The controversial statue was put up by artists issued an official permit to “demonstrate freedom of speech and artistic expression using political imagery” by the National Park Service. “Good for you, National Park Service,” said Colbert, “and thank you for protecting free speech for almost 24 hours”, because despite the permit allowing the sculpture to stand until Sunday, park police removed it on Wednesday morning.In response, Colbert pretended to navigate the cancellation of Disney+ on his phone – “worked last time!”Park police said the statue was not “in compliance” with the permit, though it did not specify how. “I think we know how it violated the permit,” said Colbert. “We’ve all seen those signs in the national parks: ‘Leave no trace … of the Epstein files.’”Seth MeyersAnd on Late Night, Seth Meyers focused on Trump’s visit to the UN in New York this week. “It’s easy to forget because so much has happened, but when Trump was running for president last year, he was adamant he was going to bring peace to the world,” he reminded viewers before several clips of Trump making such claims as “I will end the chaos in the Middle East quickly” or end the war in Ukraine “in no longer than one day”.“In fairness, he said it would take him one day, he didn’t say which day,” Meyers laughed. But “as a general rule, you should always be skeptical when someone tells you they can solve any problem in one day”.But Trump didn’t focus on any of that at his UN address. Instead, he was thrown off by a broken escalator, which shut down as soon as he stepped on to it. On Fox News, Karoline Leavitt accused the UN of trying to “sabotage” him with the frozen escalator and teleprompter.“Man, you know I’ve heard a lot about these globalists over the years, but I didn’t realize their MO was to just burn you with soft pranks,” Meyers laughed.“Teleprompter down, escalator off. When the president was talking, someone tied his shoelaces together! Are they a shadowy cabal or Kevin from Home Alone?”On Wednesday evening, Trump took to Truth Social to name the escalator episode among three “very sinister events” that took place during his UN visit. He claimed that Melania avoided a “disaster” by not falling “forward onto the sharp edges of these steel steps, face first”. He then called for the arrest of the person responsible for the frozen escalator.A spokesperson for the UN previously blamed Trump’s videographer for the incident, suggesting that they may have “inadvertently triggered” a built-in safety function while proceeding backward up the escalator to film his arrival.Meyers had to laugh: “Oh, hey, look at that – they solved the conflict in one day! How about that?” More

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      They’ve finally gone there: South Park lets rip at Benjamin Netanyahu

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      In the three weeks since South Park last aired, things have changed. The assassination of rightwing pundit Charlie Kirk exploded already fiery political tensions, with the Trump administration and its base embarking on a campaign of retribution the likes of which haven’t been seen since the McCarthy era, and stating, without sufficient evidence, that Kirk’s murder was the result of a wide-ranging leftist plot. Scores of people in the public and private sectors have been punished for commenting on the situation, most notably late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, whose show was briefly pulled off air after the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, put parent company Disney under pressure to do so.Suffice to say, the situation is far too dire to worry about where a cartoon sitcom fits into it all, but South Park is a special case. The first episode of season 27 revolved around the politically motivated cancellation of Stephen Colbert, another late-night talkshow host critical of Donald Trump, while the second directly lampooned Kirk.Many on the right have declared South Park morally complicit in Kirk’s murder, despite the fact that Kirk himself celebrated the parody (going so far as to use its caricature of him as his X profile picture). Repeats of that episode were pulled from Comedy Central, although it remains available to stream on Paramount+. Then, a week to the day after Kirk’s death, it was announced that the new episode of South Park would be postponed. This sparked speculation of censorship, although showrunners Matt Stone and Trey Parker roundly denied this, claiming it was simply a matter of a blown deadline (the result of their famously tight schedule).View image in fullscreenWhile that seems like an all too convenient excuse, Parker and Stone have never backed down from controversy before. Then again, said controversy has never been this furious before, nor hit so close to home for them. The big question ahead of the newest episode was: what would South Park have to say about all this?The answer is … not much.The latest instalment, provocatively titled Conflict of Interest, makes no mention of Kirk, although it does tackle the aftermath in a roundabout way. In one of the two main storylines, Trump, upset over the impending birth of his unholy lovechild with Satan, sets a series of convoluted traps to force an abortion, only for Carr to continually wander into them. By the end of the episode, Carr, badly injured and hosting a brain parasite as a result of toxoplasmosis from being buried in a mountain of cat poo, is at risk of “losing his freedom of speech”.View image in fullscreenDespite avoiding one of the touchiest subjects of the day, South Park steered headlong into another, finally addressing the genocide in Palestine by way of prediction market apps. A bet on one of the platforms – “Will Kyle’s mom strike Gaza and destroy a Palestinian hospital?” – grows so large that Kyle’s mom ends up flying to Israel to put a stop to it.For most of the episode, the outrage is directed at all sides, with Kyle angrily yelling: “Jews and Palestinians are not football teams that you bet on”, and his mother proclaiming: “It’s not Jews versus Palestine, it’s Israel versus Palestine!”However, that outrage is ultimately aimed at a specific party, with Kyle’s mom barging into the office of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and letting rip: “Just who do you think you are, killing thousands and flattening neighbourhoods, then wrapping yourself in Judaism like it’s some shield from criticism!” If Netanyahu’s comeuppance isn’t as scatologically extreme as Carr’s, it still provides a fleeting moment of catharsis.While not the most outrageous episode of the season, this may be the funniest, with the Looney Tunes-like gags and the prevalence of JD Vance’s impish caricature both earning huge laughs. And if this week’s South Park didn’t quite meet the moment head-on, neither did it back down. It’s good to know that it will continue to go after Trump and his cronies no matter how hot the political temperature grows.

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      Stephen Colbert on JD Vance’s water level raising: ‘Insane spoiled baby emperor move’

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      Late-night hosts took aim at JD Vance over his unusual birthday demand and Donald Trump over his disastrous tariffs.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert called it “a significant day for our economy” with Trump’s controversial tariffs finally kicking in. He said it’s a day to “set your clocks back to more expensive” with import taxes now the highest they’ve been since the Great Depression.Colbert said it’s “never a great sign to be compared to the worst thing ever”.Tariffs on certain countries are lower if negotiations have been successful or “if the president’s mad at you they can be much higher”.This week saw Apple announce $100bn worth of additional investment in the US, but there is a smaller pool of American workers with the skills necessary to make an iPhone. “I believe America’s children can do anything!” Colbert joked.The company’s CEO, Tim Cook, was filmed this week in the Oval Office giving Trump a gift which was partly made of 24-carat gold. Colbert called it “lavish corporate bottom-smooching”.In the same press opportunity, Trump again slammed Colbert for having “no talent” but did concede that he has better ratings than Kimmel or Fallon, whom he said also had no talent. “We’re all equally untalented,” Colbert said, before adding: “Thank you for watching, sir.”Colbert said that while we are “plunging headfirst into techno-feudalism”, the Secret Service is busy raising the water level of an Ohio river for Vance’s family boat trip to celebrate his birthday. He called it an “insane spoiled baby emperor move”.Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers said that Trump “clearly has no interest in doing the job of president” and doesn’t “know or care what his own administration is doing on a daily basis”.He is too busy renovating the White House with plans revealed this week for a new $200m ballroom decked out in gold. Trump has said it’s important as there hasn’t been a president like him who has been good at ballrooms before.Meyers commented that it’s “never been a problem that our presidents weren’t good at ballrooms”.To show how little Trump knows about the day-to-day, he played a clip just after the US illegally bombed Iran in which he was told by a reporter that the intelligence community said it had no evidence that Iran was developing a nuclear weapon, which the president called false.This week when he was asked about Robert F Kennedy Jr’s decision to cancel $500m in contracts for vaccine development, he also appeared confused. “For a guy who watches cable news all day, you sure seem caught off-guard by the news,” Meyers said.There are also plans to put a nuclear reactor on the moon, a decision bragged about on Fox News with claims that “Trump doesn’t play by the rules”. Meyers admitted that this is true as at Nasa, rule No 1 is “don’t blow up the moon”.Ignoring the inflation that’s ballooning thanks in part to Trump’s tariffs, the administration is instead having to deal with the fallout of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Trump “flew into a rage again” after being asked about it this week.It’s still proving to be “explosive for Trump and his Maga base” and so this week a dinner was planned on Epstein strategy involving high-ranking loyalists. Nothing like a “secretive cabal” of powerful people to settle the conspiracy theorists, Meyers noted.It was reportedly planned by Vance, whom Trump threw under the bus when he was asked about it this week. “No matter how much you try to appease Trump or suck up to him, he’s eventually going to betray you,” he said. More

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      Seth Meyers on the Epstein conspiracy: ‘This is a crisis of Trump’s making’

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      Late-night hosts discussed the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein scandal and the “spite” behind Donald Trump’s impending tariffs.Seth MeyersOn Late Night, Seth Meyers spoke about the theories circulating over the death of Epstein, spurred on by the alleged missing minute from his jail cell video on the night of his death.He said that Trump is not in the right place to be handling it, as he’s “old” and “tired” and just came back from a golfing vacation in Scotland.While there, he opened a private new golf course, which was on the official White House live stream. “They’re not even pretending any more, there’s no separation,” Meyers said.Trump is “tired from all his golfing and self-enrichment” and was recently seen trying not to fall asleep during a press briefing with Mehmet Oz. “Imagine if Joe Biden did this,” he said.Meyers added that “he can’t hear or understand reporters’ questions any more” before playing footage of him getting confused over a recent question about Russia.Trump has been asked why he cut ties with Epstein and recently said he didn’t want to waste people’s time by going through the details. “Please, my man, waste our time!” Meyers said.He then “dug the hole even deeper” and “made it so much worse” by rambling on about Epstein stealing workers from his spa, which he said was one of the best spas in the world. “Stop talking about the spa – is it your safe word?” Meyers asked.But it’s “not just Trump who keeps digging a hole for himself”, there’s also Dan Bongino, an Epstein-obsessed podcaster who is now the deputy director of the FBI.Despite him claiming that the full, unedited tape would be released, experts have said that while it might be “unclear how much time is missing”, this isn’t the full tape after all.“This whole thing is a crisis of Trump’s making,” he said.Stephen ColbertOn The Late Show, Stephen Colbert reminded viewers that it was the last day of July, which means that the “basket of deplorable tariffs are gonna kick in” the day after.Trump had originally claimed he had made 200 deals ready for 1 August but “on the other hand, no he didn’t”, with just eight in place before the deadline.Colbert said that “his demands are insane” and many of the countries are included “just for spite”.This week also saw him revive the presidential fitness test for American schoolchildren so they could be “as fit as President Trump”. It had originally been retired in 2012 for a switch to a focus on individual health rather than athletic feats.Trump signed the executive order flanked by athletes, including former NFL star Lawrence Taylor, who is a registered sex offender. Colbert called it “a brilliant way to distance yourself from the whole Epstein scandal”.This week also saw lawyer Alan Dershowitz, known for clients such as OJ Simpson, Harvey Weinstein and Trump, make further complaints about how he is shunned while in Martha’s Vineyard.He had previously complained that his politics had made him a social pariah, but now he is suing a vendor who refused to serve him pierogi. He was later seen speaking to a police officer about the incident.“They have bigger crimes to investigate, like someone’s houseguest bringing a domestic chardonnay,” Colbert quipped. More

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      Trump claims new CBS owner will gift him $20m worth of airtime after $16m settlement

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      Donald Trump has claimed that the future owner of the US TV network CBS will provide him with $20m worth of advertising and programming – days after the network canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.The US president recently reached a $16m settlement with Paramount, the parent of CBS News, over what he claimed was misleading editing of a pre-election interview with the Democratic candidate for president, Kamala Harris.While CBS initially called the lawsuit “completely without merit”, a view shared by many legal experts, Paramount is in the midst of an $8bn sale to the Hollywood studio Skydance Media, which requires the approval of federal regulators.In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump claimed the settlement had been paid – and that he was expecting much more from the new owners of Paramount.“Paramount/CBS/60 Minutes have today paid $16 Million Dollars in settlement, and we also anticipate receiving $20 Million Dollars more from the new Owners, in Advertising, PSAs [public service announcements], or similar Programming, for a total of over $36 Million Dollars,” he wrote.CBS and Skydance did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Trump’s claim that he has been offered millions of dollars’ worth of programming is likely to exacerbate anger over the axing of The Late Show, which CBS announced on Thursday.Days earlier, Colbert, a high-profile critic of Trump, had branded Paramount’s settlement with Trump “a big fat bribe”. He is due to remain on air until May, and declared on Monday that “the gloves are off”.Skydance was founded in 2010 by David Ellison, son of the tech billionaire Larry Ellison, co-founder of Oracle, and an ally of Trump.The $16m settlement was already seen by critics as a further example of capitulation by media companies hoping to smooth the waters with the US president. ABC News, ultimately owned by Disney, also agreed to pay $15m to settle a defamation lawsuit over its coverage.After Trump’s latest claim regarding $20m worth of advertising and programming from Paramount, the Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren said in a statement on X, formerly Twitter: “This reeks of corruption.” More

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      Losing Stephen Colbert and the Late Show is a crushing blow, whatever the reason | Adrian Horton

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      Last Thursday, when Stephen Colbert announced on air that CBS had decided to cancel The Late Show, its flagship late-night comedy program, after 33 years in May of next year, I was shocked.For the better part of six years, I have watched every late-night monologue as part of my job at the Guardian (hello, late-night roundup), and though I often grumble about it, The Late Show has become a staple of my media diet and my principle source of news; as a millennial, I haven’t known a television landscape without it. There are many bleaker, deadlier things happening daily in this country, and the field of late-night comedy has been dying slowly for years, but the cancellation of The Late Show, three days after Colbert called out its parent company for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump, felt especially and pointedly depressing – more a sign of cultural powerlessness and corporate fecklessness in the face of a bully president than the inevitable result of long-shifting tastes.Reporting in the days since the announcement have lent some credence to CBS’s claim that this was “purely a financial decision”. Though The Late Show has led the field of late-night comedy in ratings for years, it only averages about 2.47 million viewers a night. Its ad revenue plummeted after the pandemic; Puck’s Matthew Belloni reported that the show loses $40m for CBS every year. Of the network late-night shows – NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers, The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! – Colbert’s Late Show has the smallest footprint on social media, where Fallon’s celebrity gags still reign supreme. The format of late-night television – a host delivering a topical monologue, house band, celebrity guest interviews – is a living relic of a different time, when a youth-skewing audience would reliably pop on linear television at 11.30pm. The field has been contracting for years, with programs hosted by Samantha Bee, James Corden and Taylor Tomlinson ending without replacement. Ad revenue for the genre as a whole is down 50% from just seven years ago, in the middle of Trump 1.0. It’s long been assumed that the hosts currently in these once-coveted chairs would be the last, their programs expiring when they decided to step down.What’s shocking is that Colbert, who was reportedly set to renegotiate his one-year contract at the end of this season, was not given that time, which just so happens to coincide with a critical window for the intended merger of CBS parent company Paramount with Skydance Media. Three days before the announcement, Colbert called Paramount’s settlement with Trump a “big fat bribe” to incentivize the administration’s approval of this $8bn deal managed by two billionaire families.Regardless of Colbert’s contract timing, it seems the cancellation of The Late Show is a financial decision, just not in the way CBS is framing it. It’s not about the $40m The Late Show is losing per year – a lot of money, to be sure, though a drop in the bucket for the major players here – but the $8bn on the line with this merger. There were presumably other options; Late Night With Seth Meyers dispensed of its house band and musical acts last year to save money. With new billionaire ownership, there could be some business maneuvering, should independent political comedy be a priority. Colbert’s Late Show, a leading critic of Donald Trump on network television, is clearly not; the show may have been a money loser, but in this context, it’s a convenient sacrifice.And though it’s easy to roll one’s eyes at late-night television – I often do – it’s an especially disappointing one, both in the culture at large and in the dwindling 11.35pm time slot. For years, I have argued that the late-night shows have long outstripped their original function as comedy programs. They are satirical, occasionally relevant, sometimes profane, but hardly ever funny, in the traditional sense of making you laugh. Often, they resort to so-called “clapter” – laughter as a polite applause, jokes for agreement rather than laughter – in a deadening anti-Trump feedback loop. With the exception of The Daily Show, a cable program founded for the purpose of political satire, the shows basically serve two functions in the internet era: 1 Generate viral celebrity content as they promote another project, and 2 Comment freely on the news, unbound from the strictures of decorum, tone and supposed “objectivity” that hamstrings so much journalism in the US.The latter was, I’d argue, the most important contribution of late-night television in the Trump era, when the president and his minions exceeded parody, and Colbert was the best at it. Nimble, erudite, self-deprecating but exceptionally well-read, Colbert transformed from extremely successful Fox News satirist to the reverend father of late-night TV: principled, authoritative but hardly ever self-righteous, deeply faithful to the American project, steadfastly believing in the decency of others. (Colbert is a practicing Catholic and die-hard Lord of the Rings fan, facts that sometimes snuck into his monologues.) At times, such old-school values felt insufficient for the moment; the format of late-night comedy as a whole has proven futile, even pathetic, in the face of Donald Trump’s brand of shamelessness, the Maga movement’s ability to turn everything into a joke. But these hosts, and the Daily Show-trained Colbert especially, did something that the rest of news media or the sprawling celebrity and comedian podcast network could not: call bullshit on the administration with the imprimatur of a major television network, and say exactly what they were feeling.That ability proved useful to me, as a viewer, at times when it seemed standard media was incapable of articulating what was happening. During the pandemic, or the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, or on January 6, or when Trump was re-elected, or when Republicans mocked Californians during the devastating LA wildfires earlier this year, late-night television had the freedom to express outrage, and Colbert in particular to express moral injury. The jokes were almost never surprising; they weren’t really even jokes. But it still felt soothing to see someone say them, with corporate backing, at an institution that still carried enough name recognition to, well, merit a “late-night roundup”.Colbert, ultimately, will be fine. He is a skilled comedian whose talents weren’t always well-tapped by the strict format of late-night comedy. Perhaps he will join the legion of comedians with podcasts, speaking directly to fans; perhaps he will release a special. But his absence from late-night television spells doom for the rest of the format, and more importantly for freedom of speech on the big networks. Late-night comedy has been fighting a losing battle for a long time, and The Late Show was never going to out-influence the rising tide of rightwing media, the manosphere or any number of independent shows in a fracturing media landscape. But the fact that he could try, from one of the more famed perches in television, still meant something. More

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      Democrats condemn CBS for axing Colbert show: ‘People deserve to know if this is politically motivated’

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      Democrats are condemning CBS for its recent decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, noting the news comes just a few days after its host criticized the network’s parent company, Paramount, for settling a $16m lawsuit with Donald Trump.Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who appeared as a guest on Colbert’s show on Thursday night, later wrote on social media: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.”In early July, Paramount settled a “frivolous” lawsuit with Trump over the president’s claim that CBS News deceptively edited an interview with then presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Paramount is also seeking approval from the US Federal Communications Commission for an $8.4bn merger with Skydance Media. On Monday, Colbert called the settlement “a big fat bribe”.Colbert’s firing would not be the first potentially spurred by a dispute with the president. In February, after MSNBC fired host Joy Reid, Trump celebrated her show’s cancellation. Reid, a Black woman, had been a vocal critic of Trump and spoke frankly about the Black Lives Matter movement and war in Gaza. And in December, ABC News agreed to settle a defamation lawsuit Trump filed against the network and anchor George Stephanopoulos with a $15m payment to a Trump foundation and museum, as well as paying $1m in the president’s legal fees.The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who has called for an investigation into Paramount’s relationship with Trump over the Skydance merger, wrote: “CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount.”Skydance is owned by David Ellison, the son of a close Trump ally, Larry Ellison.Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington also posted on social media, writing: “People deserve to know if this is a politically motivated attack on free speech.”Bernie Sanders, the independent Vermont senator, echoed similar concerns. “CBS’s billionaire owners pay Trump $16 million to settle a bogus lawsuit while trying to sell the network to Skydance,” he wrote. “Stephen Colbert, an extraordinary talent and the most popular late night host, slams the deal. Days later, he’s fired. Do I think this is a coincidence? NO.”CBS announced it would retire the Late Show after Colbert’s contract ends in May, cutting short a 33-year run that began when David Letterman launched the show in 1993. The show received an Emmy nomination earlier in the week for talk series.A number of celebrities also voiced their frustration with the cancellation, including concerns that it may have been politically motivated. In a social media post the actor John Cusack wrote: “He’s not groveling enough to American fascism – Larry Ellison needs his tax cuts – doesn’t need comedians reminding people they are not cattle.”In a joint statement, Paramount and CBS executives wrote that the cancellation was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night”.They said they considered “Stephen Colbert irreplaceable” and that the show’s cancellation “is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount”.Writing on his own social media platform, Trump celebrated the show’s cancellation: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show.”Trump has called for the network to fire Colbert since September 2024, when the host called the president “boring” during an interview with PBS NewsHour. More

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      Stephen Colbert on Trump’s Epstein controversy: ‘Desperately looking for a scapegoat’

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      Late-night hosts dig into Donald Trump’s growing anxiety over the Jeffrey Epstein files and his beef with the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell.Stephen ColbertOn Thursday evening, Stephen Colbert announced that the Late Show would end in May 2026, owing to a decision by the CBS parent company, Paramount. Though Paramount said the decision was “purely financial”, the cancellation comes just three days after Colbert openly criticized the company for settling a lawsuit with Donald Trump for $16m.The settlement coincided with Paramount seeking approval from the Trump administration for an $8.4bn merger with Skydance Media. Colbert called the settlement “a big fat bribe”.In a separate message to viewers on Thursday, Colbert said he was informed of the decision the night before. “Yeah, I share your feelings,” he said as the audience booed.“It’s not just the end of the show, it is the end of the Late Show on CBS. I’m not being replaced, this is all just going away,” he added. “Let me tell you, it is a fantastic job. I wish someone else was getting it. And it is a job I am looking forward to doing with this usual gang of idiots for another 10 months.”During his monologue, Colbert focused on the Jeffrey Epstein controversy consuming the White House, and “causing so much trouble for Trump that he recently ordered it to be put in a cell and for the cameras to stop working for three minutes”.“Maga is furious because they think Trump is refusing to release the Epstein files,” he explained. “In response, Trump has been saying that there are no credible files, and if there are, they’re really boring, and also Obama made them up.“That part is true, and you can read them on Obama’s annual summer Epstein client list,” he joked.“As crazy as it is, Trump is going all in on the idea that his followers have fallen for a nefarious Democratic scheme.” As Trump said in the Oval Office on Wednesday: “Certain Republicans got duped by the Democrats, and they’re following the Democrat playbook.”“That is ridiculous – the Democrats have never had a playbook,” Colbert joked. “It’s improv, baby!“Trump is desperately looking for a scapegoat,” so on Wednesday, he fired the Manhattan prosecutor who handled the Epstein case and “pulled the Uno reverse card”, calling on the FBI to investigate “this Jeffrey Epstein hoax”.“By which he evidently means he wants the FBI to investigate the folks who investigated Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking,” Colbert said, “which is weird, but we could get a whole new spinoff of To Catch a Predator.”Seth MeyersTrump “is under a lot of pressure from all this Epstein stuff. Even his most devoted supporters are trashing him and demanding answers,” said Seth Meyers on Thursday’s Late Night before clips of numerous Republicans demanding answers and even calling for an independent special counsel.In an interview with a far-right media network, Trump called the Epstein files a “scam” that’s “all put out by Democrats, some of the naive Republicans fall right into line like they always do”.“Fall in line with what?” an exasperated Meyers asked. “Democrats didn’t say a word. Your own supporters are the ones who spent years demanding the files and obsessing over the Epstein case, which was a very real criminal case involving a very real person, and now you’re the one fanning the flames of the conspiracy by calling it all a hoax. I swear we’re like a day away from Trump claiming Jeffrey Epstein was never even a real person.”Meyers also homed in on the far-right interviewer who validated Trump with “they definitely set the Republicans up.”“Set them up how?!” he implored. “We’ve been asking this question all week: how did they set up the Republicans? They made up fake Epstein files, then kept those fake files secret, then convinced the entire Maga base to spend years demanding the release of those files, then knew they would lose the election to Trump, who would then refuse to release the files they made up? You people all need to take a fucking dementia test.”The Daily Show“We all know President Trump has spent the last two weeks in a wrestling match with the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein,” said Jordan Klepper on the Daily Show. “But he’s been fighting the last six months with a much more alive person: Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell. And boy does Trump hate the guy.”Klepper played a series of clips in which Trump called Powell a “stupid person”, an “average, mentally, person. I’d say low at what he does” and a “numbskull … you talk to the guy and it’s like talking to nothing. It’s like talking to a chair.”“Yeah! Whatever happened to all of our exciting, dynamic Federal Reserve chairs?” Klepper joked.“The way Trump talks about him, you’d think they caught him at a Coldplay concert with Trump’s wife,” he added. “But at its heart, this is a beef about economics. Trump wants to lower interest rates to help juice the economy, but Jerome Powell is in charge of setting those interest rates, and he refuses to lower them because he’s worried that will increase inflation. And nothing, nothing makes Trump angrier than someone doing their job well.”In another clip, Trump blasted Joe Biden for nominating Powell. Except … Klepper cut to a clip of Trump nominating Powell in 2017, calling him “strong,” “committed” and “smart”.“Damn, Joe Biden looks fat as shit,” Klepper joked. “But also, I get it. I’m also trying desperately to forget everything that happened during Trump’s first term.” More