Last Weak Tonight

I want to give a shout-out where a shout-out is due. Oliver Darcy called this way before anyone else.

Recently, Darcy wrote that Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart were on thin ice as a result of the messy, ongoing Paramount merger, which was facing political challenges to getting things across the finish line. (Darcy has a pretty firm paywall on his newsletter, Status News, but Status recently launched a podcast where he went deep on the issue with his co-host and editor, Jon Passantino.)

The company has busted through some notable ethical lines in its effort to push things through, and it seems that Colbert and Stewart may be on the losing end of all of that.

The shoe dropped for Colbert on Thursday, when CBS announced its plan to end The Late Show after a 33-season run, giving their star host one last season to call out his bosses on air, per Variety.

“It is a fantastic job. I wish somebody else was getting it,” Colbert said during his monologue on Thursday night, which was met with a chorus of boos directed at CBS.

(The less diplomatic Jimmy Kimmel, in an Instagram story, had this to say in response to the news: “Love you Stephen. Fuck you and all your Sheldons CBS.”)

Colbert still has plenty of runway left if he wants to keep going—at 61, he’s just a year younger than both Stewart and Conan O’Brien, who are each having late-career hot streaks. (Well, Stewart’s might be a little less streaky, depending on what happens next.)

Many folks watching at home have immediately jumped to the conclusion that this was a decision intended to appease the Trump administration, which appears to be throwing numerous wrenches into Paramount’s merger with Skydance. (One of those people is journalist Jonathan Alter, whose wife Emily Lazar once served as Colbert’s executive producer.) The administration has already caused significant issues for 60 Minutes, thanks to a lawsuit over a Kamala Harris interview the Trump campaign claimed was misleading.

But it’s worth keeping in mind that Trump isn’t the only problem for Paramount, a company that controls the legacy cable channels MTV, Comedy Central, and Nickelodeon, among others. Recently, South Park fans have been up in arms because Skydance seems to want to renege on the creators’ deal, which has led the megahit show to disappear from Paramount+ in most markets. (I was seriously considering writing something about that situation, which has more twists and turns than the rock formations at Casa Bonita. Still might.)

And Taylor Sheridan, the creator of Yellowstone and many of the company’s high-end streaming hits, is upset about potential budget cuts related to the deal.

There are apparently no safe jobs in Skydance’s house. Are there greatly overpaid folks on the Paramount payroll? Most assuredly—the company infamously pays Sheridan’s team half a billion dollars per year, a large cut of which presumably goes to Sheridan. Colbert’s contract is nowhere near that, mind you—one stat puts it at $15 million per year, on par with Kimmel and just below Jimmy Fallon. (But on the other hand, late-night shows tend to have short shelf lives compared to dramatic fare.) And that’s not even looking at the executive ranks.

This merger, like other previous moves involving large entertainment empires (looking at you, David Zaslav), underlines one plainly obvious thing: These conglomerates have too much power.

Their decisions can make no outward sense, and we’re all just kind of stuck trying to figure out what their deal is. Earlier this year, I wrote a piece about how Warner Bros. Discovery had thrown a bunch of old movies on YouTube, a decision I described as bewildering at the time.

Also bewildering: As I was researching this piece, I noticed all the movies were gone. The playlist was gone, just as fast as I saw it. That piece drew a lot of attention—it was my second-most-popular of the year. And just like that, in the parlance of a current WBD show, it’s gone.

There is a thick-as-mud feeling that the studios create. Not just one studio, every studio. Colbert losing his gig over apparent above-his-pay-grade politics? It doesn’t seem to make sense unless you see some sort of political element to it. I’m reminded of the “Vaulter” episode of Succession, where Kendall Roy shuts down a Gawker-style newsroom seemingly just to stay on his dad’s good side.

(Ironically, as the Colbert news was hitting, the media family that Succession was based on, the Murdochs, showed surprising backbone in letting an explosive story get published in The Wall Street Journal, over the objections of the Trump administration.)

Entertainment and media are too concentrated in power in just a few hands. That can be good if you like high-budget fare or big stars. But it is increasingly clear that this ecosystem has some serious problems that will only be solved with a lot more decentralization.

The next Colbert will not come from traditional media. (That person will not be a “Joe Rogan of the left,” because that is a false construct.) It will be someone on YouTube or a podcast who has a small studio and no studio audience. We may lose the late night franchise in the process, along with the many jobs it supported, but at least it’ll be a little less corrupted by money and politics.