Comedy’s cultural center of gravity has shifted under Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert’s feet.

(Illustration by Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post; Getty Images; iStock)

By Mark Robichaux

Mark Robichaux, an author and journalist, is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who covered the television industry.

When Jimmy Kimmel returned to the air after a brief suspension for comments about the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s killing, he was rewarded with 6.26 million viewers, his biggest audience in over a decade.

But the spike masked a harsh truth about the entire late-night talk genre. The format is dying, and no amount of viral clips or headline-grabbing monologues is going to save it.

CBS’s announcement two months earlier said more about the state of the industry than any ratings bump: “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” will end in May 2026, shutting down the Late Show franchise after more than 30 years. Since 2017, it has been the top performer in the late‑night field in key demos, but winning in a shrinking market is still losing. CBS blamed “a challenging backdrop in late night” — corporate-speak for hemorrhaging money on a format that no longer makes financial sense.

Critics cried foul, as Colbert had recently mocked Paramount’s $16 million legal settlement with President Donald Trump (“a big fat bribe!”), just as the company sought regulatory approval for its merger with Skydance. Democratic senators including Edward J. Markey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts publicly questioned whether the cancellation was politically motivated.

Was there political pressure? Without a doubt. But here’s the simpler, undeniable truth: “The Late Show” stopped being worth the cost. And the old model it represents — celebrity guests, scripted monologues, musical acts — was built for a media world that no longer exists. YouTube, TikTok, podcasts and streaming have flattened the attention economy. Younger audiences aren’t sitting through 60 minutes of middling entertainment to catch a joke that will be viral by morning.

The annual production cost of “The Late Show” — salaries, studio, travel, band, etc. — is estimated around $100 million, while losses have been reported at $40 million or more. Meanwhile, the broader economics of late night have cratered: Ad revenue across the genre plunged from $439 million in 2018 to just $220 million by 2024, according to media analytics firm Guideline. That’s not a dip. It’s a collapse that mirrors the rapid decline in both viewership and advertiser interest.

Late-night TV was once a pillar of American culture. Between wisecracks, iconic hosts shaped the national conversation, starting with Steve Allen and Jack Paar in the 1950s, then the “king of late night,” Johnny Carson, who reigned for 30 years until 1992, followed by David Letterman and Jay Leno.

All this has long been unfolding before our sleep-deprived eyes. James Corden, Conan O’Brien and Samantha Bee all exited the stage — and none of their shows were replaced. CBS canceled “After Midnight” in March. NBC trimmed “The Tonight Show” to four nights a week last year after cutting the band for “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” At the Emmys, the talk-show category shrank to just three nominees this year — half the number from 2019.

The cultural center of gravity has moved on. Comedy has left the studio, and now lives beyond broadcast and cable TV on platforms that are faster, looser and far cheaper to produce: podcasts, YouTube channels, TikTok feeds. “The Joe Rogan Experience” dominates with an estimated 14.5 million subscribers to his Spotify podcast and 20.3 million on YouTube. Alex Cooper’s “Call Her Daddy” reaches millions weekly, and last year she signed a $125 million deal with SiriusXM. And Conan O’Brien — who once struggled to crack 1 million nightly viewers on TBS — now commands more than 9 million subscribers on YouTube, where clips routinely rack up millions of views.

Of course, YouTube views are not equivalent to Nielsen ratings. A user might watch five seconds of a clip; a TV rating reflects average viewership per minute. But the audience shift is unmistakable: Younger viewers now live online. Noting that Kimmel’s comeback show reached four times as many people on social video — nearly three times on YouTube alone, media analyst Evan Shapiro declared, “Broadcast is over. YouTube is TV. The audience is in control.”

The economics reflect that shift — and the tension it brings. Traditional late-night TV shows can still command advertising CPMs (cost per thousand views ) of $40 or more for premium ad slots, especially in the 18-49 demographic. YouTube, by contrast, typically gets from $2 to $15 per thousand views unless bolstered by big sponsorships. That gap helps explain why networks are slow to let go of linear television — even as the audience walks away from it.

The underlying issue is simple: Digital platforms pay less per viewer. And yet, it’s on these platforms that audiences are increasingly watching late-night content — if they’re watching at all.

That’s the wall the genre has hit: sky-high production costs for shows increasingly consumed on platforms that don’t pay like TV used to. The audience moved. The advertisers hesitated. And the model stopped making sense.

The end of late-night talk is just one tremor in a seismic shift that’s reshaping American media consumption. In May, the ground moved definitively: Nielsen reported that streaming surged to a record 44.8 percent of total TV usage, more than broadcast (20.1 percent) and cable (24.1 percent) combined. It’s not just late-night that’s fading — it’s the entire era of appointment television.

After Colbert’s final show, the 11:35 p.m. slot on CBS is set to be without a talk-show host for the first time since 1993.

Colbert’s departure isn’t a judgment of talent. It’s a statement about cost and return — one every network is now quietly making.

Late-night talk didn’t lose to politics. It lost to platforms.