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 Donald 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.”

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.