It’s the old — and not very funny — joke: Where does a 1,000-pound gorilla sit?
Answer: Wherever he wants.
The Late Show host Stephen Colbert may not quite be the 1,000-pound gorilla of the modern interview format (that would be Joe Rogan), but he certainly carries a lot of weight. When you’re the highest-rated late-night host on broadcast television and one of the most recognizable people in media, plus have a loyal audience that has grown addicted to watching you five nights a week for years … you have a significant value in the marketplace, even if CBS is showing you the door.
Colbert may not be able to sit anywhere he wants when his series ends, but he’s definitely going to have a few seats to choose from.
In some sense, the 61-year-old’s relative lack of future-proofing preparedness for this upheaval is his own fault. Despite coming to CBS from the once-edgy realm of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show and his own The Colbert Report, the host’s tenure on broadcast has been marked by his embrace of a highly traditional talk show format. On NBC, Jimmy Fallon has long produced digital shorts, making potentially viral content for online users. On ABC, Jimmy Kimmel made himself into a network utility player — hosting awards shows, game shows and delivering a set each year at the New York upfronts. Conan O’Brien — having previously been fired from a broadcast talk show — wisely and pre-emptively launched his hit podcast three years before TBS pulled the plug on his cable network talk show in 2021.
Colbert — and this isn’t meant as a slight — seemed to simply enjoy doing the job as a talk show host in the studio every night to the best of his ability. Given that his ratings were better than his rivals, why would he have done anything different? One could easily imagine Colbert being reassured by network executives over the years: Just keep doing what you’re doing. After all, if you’re consistently winning your time slot, and staying out of trouble, that’s all you’ve ever needed to do on television since … well, since the dawn of television. Your business has a real problem if you can’t win by winning (The New York Times reports ad revenue for late night has dropped by half in the last seven years and, last month, broadcast fell below 20 percent of all TV viewing for first time).
With CBS deciding to cancel The Late Show — not ditch the show’s highly paid current host, but retire the format — the network has basically undercut the speeches that all broadcast presidents and ad sales executives give each year at the upfronts: That broadcast remains strong, that it’s still relevant and still matters. Colbert arguably has better options than the network giving him the boot. He is a talent and talent can draw an audience. While CBS now has … what? A hole that needs to be filled.
So what happens now? Not at CBS, but for Colbert?
David Letterman launched an elevated interview show on Netflix. Jon Stewart did his own twist on The Daily Show for Apple TV+ and launched a podcast before returning to The Daily Show. And O’Brien not only launched a podcast, but a whole podcast network, which he sold to SiriusXM for a tidy $150 million, and on the side makes a travel show for HBO Max.
The easiest option for Colbert would be if another company — perhaps a deep-pocketed streamer — wants to pay him to keep doing something rather similar to what he’s already doing for a chance at getting his 2.4 million viewers a night. The bigger hurdle, one imagines, is finding a company that’s both down for this and doesn’t mind potentially irking the Trump administration in the process (especially given that Disney, Apple and Amazon have seemed inclined to bend the knee, not just CBS parent Paramount).
Another road is if Colbert decides to launch his own talk or interview show — whether a podcast or on YouTube. The average age of a Colbert viewer is 68, which perhaps says more about CBS’ audience than it does Colbert’s, but it also makes it a bit tougher to imagine Colbert hustling viewers to “smash that like and subscribe button” on YouTube alongside MrBeast.
“My big thesis here is that what you’re seeing is the slow destruction of the traditional Hollywood pipeline, and you’re going to see a lot less big shots, and a lot more individuals taking a shot,” Gavin Purcell, the former showrunner for NBC’s Tonight Show, and host of the AI For Humans podcast, told THR. “Distribution is easy now. That’s the thing that’s really interesting. What’s hard is attention. And the thing that Colbert and that team still do a great job of is commanding attention.”
There’s also the unforeseeable possibility that Colbert might get signed onto some entirely new format somewhere and rise, phoenix-like, as part of a brand new thing. While he might be the most traditional of the broadcast hosts, in some respects, the man has certainly done major pivots before. The Colbert Report, after all, was Colbert pretending to be an entirely different person.
The wild-card outcome is that Colbert decides — after rolling out Trump jokes for a decade — to get in the political game himself. While Colbert lives in New Jersey, he’s from South Carolina, and one of the state’s Senate seats is open next year. Colbert has joked about the idea of running for office over the years, but when asked directly about whether he’d be interested, he tends to deflect the question. Back in 2007, when Larry King asked if he’d ever considering running for president, Colbert replied, “Obviously, every boy has thought of it. And when you look at a field [of candidates] like this, you know …”
Finally, there’s an option that’s perhaps even less likely than Colbert running for office: That he retires and stays retired. The thing about broadcast late-night hosts is all have made more than enough money to never work again, and yet they still get lulled back into some variation of the job, regardless of their age. They rarely quit a show, and, if pushed out, they eventually get another similar gig. Even Letterman — who seems like the sort of man who would retire — only managed to stay home for less than three years before popping back up on Netflix. There is, perhaps, something about the kind of person who is well suited for the late-night grind that is also the type of person who doesn’t ever want to entirely walk away.
You know who didn’t come back, however? Johnny Carson. The Tonight Show host — generally considered greatest late-night host ever — retired in 1992 and never hosted again. As he told Esquire in 2002, “You’ve got to know when to get the hell off the stage.”
But if Spotify was around in the ’90s and told Carson he could earn $30 million by working from home, interviewing whomever he wanted and could say whatever he wanted … the man might have been tempted.