Megan Basham

Yeah, well, you know, one thing I'd point out, Georgia, is that this is actually bigger than Colbert because this isn't just the last episode of his show.

It's also the last episode of The Late Show, which started under David Letterman and has run for 33 years.

So this really does feel like the end of an era.

And I think there's a couple of factors that we really need to look at here.

And of course, the big one is politics.

So like Jimmy Kimmel, Colbert's show evolved into something, I would say, much closer to nightly political commentary than to the traditional kind of late night entertainment that we expected from people like Johnny Carson and Jay Leno.

So starting under the first Trump administration, left-wing and anti-Trump monologues kind of became Colbert's stock in trade.

And just a couple of examples I could give you from what you would expect on an ordinary night of his show.

Now, that approach did work in terms of beating his competitors.

Colbert frequently led the ratings among the late night broadcast hosts.

But overall, viewership has really been drying up over the last few years.

His audience had shrunk by about 40 percent from his high in 2018.

And then his show has also been losing an estimated 40 to 50 million dollars a year.

So maybe not surprising that CBS made this decision.

No.

You know, they're very much trying to frame this as purely a financial decision, but I think it's really impossible to separate the politics from the economics here.

Networks have been looking at declining ad revenue and shrinking audiences as so many younger viewers

have migrated over to places like YouTube and TikTok and all of those streaming services.

So all of Late Night, including Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon, all of them have been facing that same kind of audience erosion.

But these shows are also very expensive to produce, and I think that's why alienating half of the potential audience was never a good long-term approach.