Late-Night TV Isn’t Dying—It’s Being Murdered

Last Week Tonight senior writer Daniel O’Brien got a big laugh onstage at Sunday’s Emmys when he accepted an award by saying he’s grateful to write late-night political satire “while it’s still a type of show that is allowed to exist.” Days later, ABC announced it was pulling Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air “indefinitely.” Though ABC’s statement didn’t include a rationale, the decision was made just hours after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened any broadcasting companies that failed to “take action” against Kimmel in light of remarks he’d made about MAGA’s response to the murder of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. “This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr, a Trump appointee, told right-wing journalist Benny Johnson. “These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

In retrospect, O’Brien’s joke feels bleakly prophetic.

“I question the sanity of anyone who does not believe this is a five-alarm fire,” former Late Show and Last Week Tonight writer Greg Iwinski told VF Wednesday night. ABC’s decision came precisely two months after CBS unceremoniously canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, making that announcement while its parent company, Paramount, waited for Carr’s FCC to approve its merger with Skydance Media. But Iwinski sees one distinct difference between the two. “They created a lot of false pretense with Stephen about money,” he says. “They didn’t bother with the pretense this time.”

“It’s just a really hard moment to tell truth to power.”

Late Show will finish its run in the spring, leaving CBS without any late-night programming for the first time in more than 30 years. Kimmel has not yet officially been fired—but if his show doesn’t return, ABC will lose both its late-night presence and, arguably, its signature star. It’s an ending that would have been unthinkable just 10 years ago, during the peak of the “peak TV” era, when networks and streaming platforms were greenlighting competitors to Colbert and Kimmel left and right.

Back then, veterans Jay Leno, Jon Stewart, David Letterman, and Craig Ferguson all retired from their hosting gigs, leading Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Trevor Noah, James Corden, and Colbert to take over their existing programs. New hosts like John Oliver, Larry Wilmore, Samantha Bee, Jordan Klepper, Hasan Minhaj, Busy Philipps, Lilly Singh, and Desus Nice and The Kid Mero launched series in subsequent years that sought to redefine what late night could look like.

A decade later, most of those new shows are gone. Tonight airs only four days per week; Late Night no longer has a house band. Millions of viewers still tune in to these shows, and through more channels than ever before, but most of them are watching on social media—where studios still can’t monetize audiences as well as they can on linear TV. Meanwhile, the political right has consolidated an immense amount of power, further threatening a genre that has spent the past decade critiquing conservatives.

The outlook is bleak, prompting regular headlines about the “death of late night “. Yet nearly a dozen late-night writers and industry experts who spoke with VF for this piece—all, save Iwinski, before Kimmel’s suspension—stopped short of proclaiming late night as good as gone. Audiences still love watching charismatic personalities interview interesting people and make jokes about the news, they say; for proof, look no further than TikTok and the celebrity video podcasts clogging feeds from X to Instagram. According to these sources, the problem is two-pronged. The first, more immediate issue, is the chilling effect Trump has had on culture broadly, and late-night comedy specifically.

Among late-night writers, it’s become tiresome to ask, “Is late night dead?” But Iwinski says if the genre is dead at this point, “It’s a murder.”

“This was the year that late night was supposedly vastly unpopular,” says Jill Twiss, who previously wrote for Last Week Tonight and The Amber Ruffin Show and now writes for Roy Wood Jr.’s CNN comedy show Have I Got News for You. “But in reality, this was the year that Amber Ruffin was supposed to host the White House Correspondents’ Dinner—and got fired because they were worried what she would say about Donald Trump. This is the year that, for whatever reason, Colbert, the number one show in late night, was canceled two days after he called out his own parent company.”

For late night writers, Colbert’s cancellation seems to be the canary in the coal mine. Was it “purely a financial decision,” as Paramount claimed—or did the company’s pending merger with Skydance put a thumb on the scale? A representative for Paramount Skydance Corporation told VF that Skydance was not made aware of the Colbert decision before CBS announced it. A source familiar with the situation also acknowledged the unfavorable optics of canceling Late Show, and said that Paramount Skydance’s merger terms did not include Late Show‘s cancellation—only the financial settlement and the two-year appointment of an ombudsman. Whatever the answer, the companies got their wish when the Trump administration approved the deal just a week after frequent Trump critic Colbert got the axe.

“I think it would be naive to talk about that cancellation on the terms that were laid out by Paramount and Skydance,” says comedian Josh Gondelman, who previously wrote for Last Week Tonight and executive-produced Desus & Mero. “They needed a merger approved by someone who has declared himself a personal enemy, essentially, of the host of their flagship late-night show.”

Several writers also wonder when, exactly, profit became Late Show’s primary business goal, when in the past, ratings have always been king. “I’ve never heard it talked about as, ‘You have to make us more money,’” Gondelman says. “Like it’s a Walgreens location that’s not bringing in enough cash.” To him, canceling Late Show exemplifies the short-sighted “slash and burn economics” of the entertainment industry in the streaming era—like when Warner Bros. Discovery started canning its own movies for a tax break instead of releasing them.

“They created a lot of false pretense with Stephen about money. They didn’t bother with the pretense this time.”

Networks and shows all have their own ways of handling money conversations, says former Full Frontal with Samantha Bee EP Alison Camillo. But as Full Frontal’s network liaison, she spoke with representatives at TBS multiple times a day—something she’s sure happens at Late Show as well. If there was an open channel between Colbert’s team and the network, “I can’t imagine that [CBS] would just blindside them like that,” she says. “But if they did, that’s terrible.”

Only the outgoing decision-makers at Paramount know for sure why Colbert got the boot—though Larry Wilmore, Colbert’s friend and former Daily Show colleague, doubts the cancellation was a response to Colbert’s anti-Trump stumping. “If that was the case,” Wilmore says, “there is no way they allowed him to stay on another nine months to keep doing the same thing.” Instead, Wilmore believes this decision could have been in the works even before the merger offered a convenient opportunity to announce it publicly. That said, he adds, “I’m still confused about a lot of it.”

The Kimmel suspension now feels like one more step in a broader pattern. ABC pulled Kimmel after Nexstar Media, which owns a large number of TV stations across the country, said that it would preempt Kimmel’s program—and as CNBC reports, Nexstar is currently seeking FCC approval for a merger with the broadcast, digital media, and marketing company Tegna. Both CBS and ABC have already settled lawsuits with Trump, frustrating their rank-and-file staffers. According to various media reports, Skydance CEO David Ellison plans to hand CBS News to conservative founder of the Free Press Bari Weiss; last week, CBS announced that former Trump adviser Kenneth Weinstein will serve as the “government-sanctioned ‘truth arbiter’” that the network agreed to install as part of its merger agreement. (A representative for CBS declined to comment.)

Media companies aren’t operating in a vacuum. American corporations and institutions from Target to Big Law have been working all year to placate Trump. After being appointed, Carr began launching formal reviews of nearly every major network—except, of course, for Fox. When CNN’s Brian Stelter asked Carr for comment after ABC pulled Kimmel off the air, Carr reportedly responded by sending a GIF of two characters from The Office raising the roof in celebration.

LateNighter editor at large Bill Carter, who literally wrote the book on the genre, believes that this environment challenges the ability of all hosts to express themselves freely—a sentiment he shared with VF even before Kimmel’s cancellation. “They have to zealously guard their free speech prerogatives,” he said, “but they cannot expose themselves to some kind of easy attack.” Former Full Frontal executive producer and head writer Melinda Taub puts it another way: “It’s just a really hard moment to tell truth to power,” she says. “Even in the form of dick jokes.”

There is historical precedent for late-night hosts getting yanked from the air for political reasons, a decision that still lives in infamy (at least for comedy writers). Back in 1969, CBS canceled The Smothers Brothers—a veritable hit with a huge audience—after both Lyndon Johnson abd Richard Nixon complained about its content, specifically the hosts and their guests’ criticism of the Vietnam War. Ever since then, Carter says, there’s been an implicit understanding that comedians can lampoon the president without fear—a sentiment echoed by multiple writers who spoke with VF.

From political cartoons about Abraham Lincoln to Leno’s constant jokes about Bill Clinton, Carter says, “This has been our history. You do not interfere with somebody’s independent voice. They can make fun of you. The difference between us and kings was that we could do that. We could do that with impunity.” Now, he says, “We’re to a point where that is apparently not the case.”

Especially since Trump does not seem content to stop with Kimmel and Colbert. “The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED” the president wrote, incorrectly, on Truth Social Wednesday—apparently so elated he couldn’t resist posting even as he was honored at a state dinner with King Charles and Queen Camilla. (According to Bloomberg reporter Lucas Shaw, Kimmel will be off the air til at least Monday; his show has not been formally canceled.) Trump continued, ominously, “That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC”—referring to Fallon and Meyers.

Trump and TV have long had a symbiotic relationship. Now, says Iwinski, “a man who has been obsessed with television his entire life finally has brow beat all three branches of government into a place where he can pick what’s on TV. And that’s what he’s doing.”

This is part one of a two-part series.