Last July, CBS announced it would end The Late Show with Stephen Colbert for “financial reasons,” pointing to declining audiences and shrinking advertising revenue. The announcement came just days after Colbert publicly mocked Paramount, CBS’s parent company, over a controversial settlement with Donald Trump—timing that has invited skepticism about whether finances alone explain the show’s abrupt cancellation. Whatever the precise cause, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will air its final episode on CBS in May.
The public sphere is often imagined as the world of salons and coffeehouses, spaces where citizens gather to debate, exchange ideas, and form public opinion. Television, in that narrative, is often villainized for replacing open debate with passive, individualized consumption—and that’s largely true for our contemporary media dominated by short-form content. But for much of the twentieth century, television also extended the public sphere, translating spaces of discussion and cultural exchange into a mass medium. At its best, late-night programming functioned as an unlikely public forum, one of the last places where serious conversation, intellectual exchange, and genuine reflection could still reach a national audience.
Nowhere was that more true than on the Colbert show. As the show comes to a close, so does a long-held vision to make late-night television something more, to edify rather than merely entertain.
One of television’s earliest visionaries staked his career on the belief that the medium could elevate the common man.
Sylvester “Pat” Weaver pioneered early versions of the format Colbert now occupies, creating The Today Show and The Tonight Show. As NBC’s vice president and later president, he revolutionized the industry with innovations that are now standard practice, including the television “special” and magazine-style advertising, where sponsors purchase blocks of time rather than sponsor an entire show.
Beyond the technical innovations lay a loftier ambition. Television, Weaver insisted, should be “an enlightenment machine.” In his words, the “grand design of television is to create an aristocracy of the people—to make the average man the uncommon man.” Weaver pioneered an initiative titled “Operation Frontal Lobes” aimed at promoting the arts and sciences through broadcasting, and mandated that NBC programs include at least one culturally enriching segment per broadcast.
While Weaver sought to elevate the public through programming, the rest of the industry pursued the lowest common denominator. Network executives believed that, unlike how people seek out specific content in books or movies, audiences simply decided to “watch television,” flipping through available options until they found something inoffensive enough to hold their attention. As a result, mindless but wildly popular fare like Gilligan’s Island or The Beverly Hillbillies could draw tens of millions of viewers.
High ideals proved hard to sustain amid cutthroat network competition. By 1955, Weaver was pushed out, unceremoniously replaced by his boss’ son. Still hailed within the industry as an innovator, Weaver tried to leverage his clout to launch a new, fourth television network devoted to “broaden[ing] horizons, upgrad[ing] standards, [and] elevat[ing] taste.” When the plan collapsed, so too did his patience. “Management doesn’t give the people what they deserve,” he railed in the Denver Post. “I don’t see any hope in the system as it is.”
The vision of a new “aristocracy of the people” fostered by commercial television may have died with Weaver’s unrealized fourth network, but the tension Weaver embodied—between television as enlightenment machine and as opiate—lived on after his NBC career.
Less than a decade after Weaver’s exit, his successors at NBC installed Johnny Carson behind the Tonight Show desk. Carson’s swift success proved there was money to be made after midnight, and rival networks wanted in on Carson’s empire. ABC handed the unenviable task to Dick Cavett, a bright-eyed, Yale-educated kid from Nebraska.
Cavett and Carson championed rival visions of late night. Carson once griped about comedians who think “just because you have a tonight show that you must deal with serious issues.” Carson’s show was defined by smooth, rapid-fire segments, rolling through three guests in quick succession to ensure there was never a lull. That, however, often left little room for depth. “It’s not a talk show,” actor Robert Blake told Playboy when asked whether he enjoyed doing The Tonight Show. “It’s some other kind of show…You got like six minutes to do your thing…And you better be good, or they’ll go to the commercial after two minutes.”
Further uptown, Dick Cavett’s show resembled something more like a renaissance salon. Audiences watched representatives of the Women’s Liberation Movement admonish Hugh Hefner for “building an empire based on oppressing women,” saw James Baldwin lecture Cavett’s former Yale Professor Paul Weiss on segregation, and heard Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer air out their storied personal and professional feud. Night after night on ABC, Cavett’s show foregrounded the culture shifts and political battles of an era convulsed by Vietnam and counter-cultural upheaval.
Cavett’s show has long captivated the imaginations of writers yearning for something more from the entertainment industry. Louis Menand noted in the New Yorker that he “gave the impression of being slightly superior to the medium—a little too bright, a little too literate, a little too intellectually upmarket for commercial television, ‘the host with the most,’ as Time called him.” Yet Cavett himself bristled at being labeled an “intellectual.” “The worst thing you can be called in television,” he shared in a New York Times interview. “I was called ‘intellectual,’ I guess, because I didn’t know any better than to read the guests’ books.”
As much as the Carson-Cavett rivalry represented a great ideological division, it didn’t make much of a difference in the ratings. By 1974, five years into Cavett’s stint, he still hadn’t made a dent in Carson’s dominance, who regularly drew twice the audience. ABC moved on. The Dick Cavett Show would live on in various forms for decades, bouncing from PBS to USA Network to CNBC, but always on smaller and smaller platforms, never again brushing the heights where Carson reigned.
If there’s an heir to Weaver and Cavett’s vision of television as something more than mere entertainment, it’s Stephen Colbert.
Colbert had remained committed to serious exchange in a format that had largely abandoned it. He made no secret of his Catholic faith and often allowed it to shape his work in meaningful ways. He left Phoebe Waller-Bridge stunned by reciting Francis Thompson’s The Hound of Heaven from memory; gave Paul Simon space to reflect on hearing loss late in his career; and, when Andrew Garfield appeared shortly after losing his mother, shared a deeply felt conversation about grief, one shaped by his own loss of his father and two brothers in a childhood plane crash. Even a breezy interview with Keanu Reeves about filming John Wick found room for the profound. “What do you think happens when we die, Keanu Reeves?” Colbert asked. Reeves paused, then answered softly, “I know the ones who love us will miss us.” Colbert let the words hang, shook Reeves’ hand, and ended the segment.
Though Colbert knew when to let silence speak, it was his decision to raise his voice that may have sealed the show’s fate. Colbert mocked Paramount for paying what he called a “big fat bribe” to President Trump, a $16 million settlement over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview as the network sought Trump’s approval for a multibillion-dollar merger. Days later, The Late Show was abruptly axed. Paramount insisted it was a purely financial decision. The timing made that hard to believe.
Whatever the cause, one fact is hard to dispute: late-night television is in decline. The Tonight Show averaged 17 million viewers at its peak; Colbert drew just 2.4 million. The five big-network late-night shows pulled in $439 million in advertising revenue in 2018; that number fell to $221 million last year. The landscape has changed: internet-native formats like Hot Ones and Chicken Shop Date are booming, podcasters now ink movie-star deals, and the success of TikTok and Instagram Reels have turned brevity into the reigning business model. Late-night television now faces an all-out war for an audience with more options than ever before, and it has nearly lost the battle.
When Dick Cavett appeared on The Late Show in 2020, Stephen Colbert eagerly took the chance to express his respect. “People ask me who my influences are,” Colbert told Cavett, “and of course Johnny [Carson], and of course Dave [Letterman]. But the one people don’t automatically know is what a huge influence you were on me. The way you interviewed people was so honest. You had such interesting guests, unusual guests, and asked such interesting questions.”
It was a touching on-air tribute—one late-night host tipping his hat to another across the generations—and for a moment the two eras overlapped, the grainy broadcast met the clear HD, united by a desk, a coffee mug, and the understanding that late-night television, for all its inherent frivolity, could occasionally transcend itself. It could spark enlightenment and introspection. It could serve a bottom-line beyond profit. It could, as Pat Weaver dreamed, “make the average man the uncommon man” for a little while each day.
Colbert upheld a fragile tradition, an ideal of what television could be. This time, though, it appears no one is coming to replace Stephen Colbert. In his absence, a chapter of American television closes for good.
This week, Haddon Barth asks the Nassau Weekly to stay up just a little later, while it’s still worth it.