Nothing to see here! CBS’s cancellation of “The Late Show,” an institution so basic to the texture of our rapidly thinning common entertainment culture that it feels like a quasi-public utility, as profligately available as water or electricity, has nothing to do, we are told, with Stephen Colbert—the show’s peppy, shrewdly wholesome host for the past decade—and his steady stream of critique aimed at President Donald Trump. Never mind that Paramount, CBS’s parent company, recently forked over sixteen million dollars to Trump, following his lawsuit against “60 Minutes.” Or that only three days before the cancellation was announced, Colbert inveighed against that settlement—calling it a “big fat bribe”—on the show. And don’t worry about the fact that Paramount now desires to sell itself to the entertainment behemoth Skydance Media, owned by the mega-rich David Ellison, and that it might help to offer up a nice, juicy Colbert-size sacrificial lamb to the Trump Administration—known, of course, for its susceptibility to bribes and ostentatious displays of forced loyalty—in order to clear the way to get the deal done.
In a statement, the CBS executives George Cheeks, Amy Reisenbach, and David Stapf insisted that the cancellation was “purely a financial decision” and—protesting so much—“not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” That’s some stressed-out syntax and an oddly specific chain of denials, but, sure, let’s say that’s true. We could consider ourselves fully briefed and move on. One of the signature features of life under the recrudescent Trump regime is that a constant sandstorm of casual lies and destabilizing ambiguity keeps obscuring important facts—the kinds of facts atop which a constitutional republic, ruled by self-governing, notionally informed citizens, is supposed to be built.
For instance: the Wall Street Journal recently reported that Trump allegedly wrote a summer-camp-style love note to the plutocrat pervert Jeffrey Epstein on the occasion of Epstein’s birthday, cooing suggestively that “enigmas never age,” and that “we have certain things in common, Jeffrey,” and wishing that “every day be another wonderful secret.” What to make of this skeevy epistle? Who knows. Trump says that this is “not my language.” Great, thanks. As goes Epstein, so goes CBS—the answer may just end up being that the world will never know. So many big questions with scant answers! Little wonder that conspiracy theories, centered on government and the high spires of business and finance, flower so easily in this era’s soil.
We get by these days reading signs, divining codes, analyzing symbols and attitudes in search of hints that might lead us to the truth. What CBS obscures, maybe a few of Colbert’s recent performances can help illuminate.
On the night that he joshed around, perhaps fatefully, with Paramount, his corporate overlord, about its settlement with Trump, Colbert was in a particularly zany mood. He’d recently been on vacation in Turkey (“I’d heard so many great things from Mayor Adams about it,” he said), and had come back stateside sporting an olive tan and a thin, suavely trimmed salt-and-pepper mustache. The ’stache, urged upon him by an insistent barber in Istanbul, became the anchoring reality for a new alter ego, “Mr. Stephen,” an “international purveyor of scented oils and rose-flavored candies,” languidly willing to set the record straight.
“Tonight, ladies and gentlemen, my mustache comes to you with a heavy heart,” Colbert said, with a falsely grave expression. “While I was on vacation, my parent corporation, Paramount, paid Donald Trump a sixteen-million-dollar settlement over his ‘60 Minutes’ lawsuit. As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I am offended. And I don’t know if anything will ever repair my trust in this company. But, just taking a stab at it, I’d say sixteen million dollars would help.”
After that joke landed, Colbert leaned closer to the camera and futzed coolly with his mustache, clearly feeling himself. As he swaggered through the rest of the routine, he kept his body loose and bendy, at several points breaking out into dance, as if his own chutzpah had occasioned an ecstatic experience. (“What can I say? Mr. Stephen loves to dance!”) This dead-serious silliness reminded me of Colbert’s early televisual appearances, on the twisted turn-of-the-century sitcom “Strangers with Candy.” Back then, Colbert played the closeted high-school teacher Chuck Noblet, who sometimes broke out into theatre-kid raptures of sudden song and choreo, mixing Colbert’s goody-goody sincerity—the center of his power as a performer—and his career-long interest in the darkest corners of the national mind. As a dismayed citizen and a gleeful satirist, he was on bivalent terrain that he recognized and enjoyed.
“I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles—it’s big fat bribe,” he said.
On Thursday night, Colbert was equally effective as a TV presence, if playing a totally opposite emotional tune, when he announced the cancellation of “The Late Show.” The tan had worn off, for one thing. Sitting sedately behind his host’s desk instead of standing up and jigging, Colbert informed the viewers about his guest, Senator Adam Schiff—another bugaboo to Trump—then quickly transitioned to telling the bad news. “I want to let you know something that I found out just last night,” he said. “Next year will be our last season.” As shocked boos and cries rained down from the studio audience, Colbert raised his voice a bit and deadpanned, “Yeah, I share your feelings.” He thanked all of his collaborators, even CBS, seeming to get emotional only when he shouted out his band.
The conventional wisdom is that late-night television is doomed, whether Colbert is one of its practitioners or not. People have too many self-directed other ways to spend their time and feed their hunger for interpretive takes on the news of the day. But Colbert, on both of these nights, displayed a kind of sly subversion that can only be achieved under the odd dual circumstances of his antiquated form—having both the constraints of a boss and the freedom of frequent live broadcasting. To clue a public in on a high-level corporate communication that was delivered only “last night” is to say, in a way, that the truth has a narrow channel from the seat of power to the cheap seats where they are. The thrill of the original so-called “late-night wars,” between NBC and CBS (and their avatars, Jay Leno and David Letterman), was that a real-life corporate competition, involving not just the careers of the hosts but billions of dollars, could play out with more or less reliable clarity, right before our eyes. You could turn on your TV and get some version of the truth.
Fewer Americans believe that anymore. And on Thursday Colbert told us what had happened. We all had to assume why. ♦
