James Corden and Taylor Tomlinson are gone. Stephen Colbert will be out the door in May next year, after CBS decided not to renew his contract and end the show entirely. The network said it made “purely a financial decision”. This has been a huge media story in the US. Every rival host chimed in, with a theory circling that the decision was made for political, not financial reasons. (Parent company Paramount requires approval for a merger and has been involved in a legal bust-up with President Trump over another show, 60 Minutes.)
And yet there is a serious discussion to be had about the death of Late Night. These shows are expensive to make. In our era of TikTok clips, podcasts, and streaming services, they don’t do the numbers they used to. There’s a really good episode of The Bill Simmons Show with Puck‘s Matt Belloni all about it:
No Stephen Colbert in the UK
We’ve never needed to have such a discussion here in the UK because late-night TV has simply never happened. Not really.
The closest we’ve been is probably the legendary Michael Parkinson, and now Graham Norton and Jonathan Ross. A TV industry insider also pointed me towards history and consummate smoothie Terry Wogan as well as a programme called Friday Night/Saturday Morning. Somewhat bizarrely, that was the first show ever to be hosted by a sitting or former Prime Minister. Harold Wilson led it on October 12 and 19, 1979.
Those are all weekly programmes, though. The four or five-night-a-week show with house bands and the like is just not part of our media landscape at all. Various attempts to make anything like what they have across the Atlantic have crashed and burned. Ironically, British hosts are popular in the US, not least aforementioned Corden who is treated much better there than here!
It is hard to put your finger on exactly why such shows don’t work in the UK. Maybe it’s just that the pure, slick happiness of it all doesn’t fit into our more cynical culture. Perhaps, as the TV insider put it to me, that the classic, left-wing, anti-establishment humour displayed in those shows isn’t actually that funny. Look at the Mash Report, cancelled in 2021. Yawn.
Above all, there might be a simple truth that we all could do with remembering once in a while – not every part of the US media needs exporting to the UK.
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