Is Late Night TV Over?

Google “Johnny Carson gets attacked by an emu.” You won’t be disappointed.

Taped back in 1983, it’s far from the strangest or funniest clip in the host’s highlight reel, and it’s certainly not the most famous. But the bit offers a potent snapshot of late night’s peculiar magic.

British puppeteer Rod Hull arrives on set with his ersatz bird that promptly snaps at Carson while playing nice with Richard Pryor on the Tonight Show couch. The moment is irresistibly funny, even if you don’t know that producers begged Hull for his puppet not to attack their host. Its blend of casual weirdness and ineffable showmanship — watch Carson slyly turn discomfort into comedy — distills the essence of late night better than any marquee guest or recurring segment. You didn’t know you wanted to see it, but once you have, you can’t get it out of your head.

In September, late night TV turns 71, ancient by television standards and, until recently, not infirm — one of American pop culture’s most durable inventions and exports. Hundreds of shows and tens of thousands of hours have aired after primetime, offering a good hang and a genial laugh to ease us from waking worry into sleep.

“The world is crazy, and we need someone to either make sense of it or find a way to laugh at it,” says veteran sitcom producer Andrew Susskind, whose father, David, hosted his own long-running syndicated talk show. “That’s always been late night’s appeal. It’s timeless.”

That timelessness, however, may turn out to have an expiration date. In July, CBS canceled The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the top-rated network entry in the genre. Extenuating factors — the host’s criticism of his network’s $16 million acquiescence to Donald Trump; a CBS boss, George Cheeks, possibly looking to curry favor with his new corporate overlord, the bottom line-minded David Ellison, whose company recently merged with CBS parent Paramount Global; and the show’s inability to find a digital foothold — may have all contributed to the decision.

Late night supporters jump on these factors: The more you see Colbert’s demise coming from these variables, the less you have to worry about the rest of the landscape. But it’s hard to shake the sense that far from being a lone sheep who strayed, Colbert may be a lemming leading the genre off a cliff.

Late night may be dying, some say, and we’d be better off with acceptance than denial. “I believe when the last of these current guys exits the stage for whatever reason, that will be that,” says Doug Herzog, the longtime head of Comedy Central and one of the creators of The Daily Show. “There won’t be a successor to [Jimmy]Fallon or [Jimmy] Kimmel or another late night show in its place. Networks will call it a day.”

Whether late night is now truly dead — the time would likely revert to local stations — or just going through a necessary reinvention isn’t clear. But like so much else these days, it leaves us wondering if this new era of tech-enabled balkanization has claimed one more victim.

From the moment Steve Allen launched Tonight in 1954 from Manhattan’s Hudson Theatre, late night has delivered moments that helped define — and sometimes transform — American culture. Allen hosting Black celebrities like Diahann Carroll despite network skittishness. Bill Clinton playing sax on Arsenio Hall. Jay Leno dominating the O.J. Simpson and Monica Lewinsky news cycles. David Letterman and Jon Stewart processing 9/11 with clarity and humanity.

It also minted stars: Joan Rivers, Bob Newhart, Robin Williams, George Carlin, Jerry Seinfeld, Letterman himself — performers simultaneously spotlighted and eclipsing the hosts who booked them. Late night functioned as the industry’s most reliable launchpad and hype machine. It was where studios sent talent to charm the masses, networks introduced new shows, and stand-ups tested material that might lead to sitcom deals. Booking a couch spot wasn’t just a promotional tactic — it was part of the pipeline.

But at its height, late night was more than just a marketing platform. It was a populist art form, as socially aware as it was silly. “Steve Allen had this incredible ability to do a serious discussion — whole shows about addiction and organized crime and McCarthyism — and then jump into a vat of Jell-O,” says Ben Alba, a professor at DePaul Law School and author of Inventing Late Night: Steve Allen and the Original Tonight Show. “It was a blend we just hadn’t seen before.”

The idea that late night shows were once apolitical is a myth. But partisanship was seldom their goal and certainly, in a country not yet addicted to outrage, almost never the consequence.

For better or worse, Tonight and its successors also helped invent the viral moment, like Drew Barrymore’s flashing of Letterman in 1995 — a paradoxical plot turn given the prime role that digital clips have played in the format’s demise.

Through it all, late night has been distinctly American — ironic but fundamentally optimistic. If things were truly hopeless, could we really all laugh together before bed? According to the Gallup-based “World Happiness Report,” Americans in the past half-century were happiest during the mid- to late 1980s — the height of the Carson-Letterman era. That may be coincidence, but it’s tempting to see it as part of a larger, now-vanished mood. Since the early 2010s — when social media use exploded — U.S. happiness levels have steadily declined, along with late night ratings.

And yet, structurally, little about the genre has changed over the course of the decades. By the time Leno took over the Tonight Show desk in 1992 — an event that itself now seems prehistoric — someone had already sat behind it for nearly 40 years making the same sort of jokes and talking to the same sort of people on the same sort of couches. And that someone, by the way, had almost always been a white male. The lack of diversity was troubling then; it’s glaring now.

Still, there was reassurance in the routine. “For five days a week, you produce a show ready to tape at 5:30 … and know it will get sent out to millions of people and be in their homes and in their ears as sometimes the last thing they hear before they go to bed,” says Hacks co-creator Jen Statsky, a former Tonight Show writer. These institutions mattered, she explains, because they offered immediate takes on the day’s events, “sometimes comforting, sometimes offering a new perspective.”

The genre was so embedded in American life that an urban myth once claimed Johnny Carson’s massively popular show — often watched from bed — was responsible for a baby boom. There’s no evidence for that, but the fact that people believed it says something about how deeply Carson and company had burrowed into our routines.

The internet ended that dominance. By the 2010s, clips were more popular than full episodes, and in 2020, NBC moved The Tonight Show and Late Night With Seth Meyers to Peacock primetime — marking the rise of a late night show that was neither late nor, for many, even a show.

Colbert still draws around 2 million nightly viewers on CBS — enough to top the field today, but hardly what Leno or Letterman averaged at their peak, and a fraction of the 11 million who tuned in nightly for Carson. The Jimmys — Fallon and Kimmel — pine for that network audience. And while they and their cable cousins — Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Bill Maher — can still command audiences on social, the idea of producing a giant celebrity-hosted show just to support the pennies of digital ad revenue (Colbert’s Late Show reportedly loses $40 million a year) and fractured minutes of viewing would get laughed at by the most mediocre MBA.

Worse, its cultural function may have vanished. If late night was born of a postwar America thirsting for national unity and the anesthetizing pleasures of its new suburban contentment, the genre’s death may be equally reflective of a moment — one whose jittery pocket-viewing has little need for expensive production or benign celebrity anecdotes. Not to mention the old social vice. We used to watch late night to wind down from a stressful day at the office. Now the office has entered our homes at night, and we’d rather spend the time getting riled up.

To the extent politics has hastened the end of late night, it’s a cruel irony: The very force that gave the format its urgency in recent years has also contributed to its collapse. And yet that urgency is exactly why some argue it’s worth preserving. “When we have an administration suing 60 Minutes or The Washington Post for expressing opinions in opposition to their agenda, it’s a particularly scary time,” says Hacks co-creator Paul W. Downs. “Now more than ever … it’s important to take care of these institutions.”

Still, perhaps its end was always baked in — not because of some flaw in the format but because the format itself was never truly built. “A lot of what we know about late night from the past 70 years is an accident,” says Alba. “It’s not like someone said, ‘Let’s come up with a desk and guests and a monologue.’ They were just things Steve Allen happened to be good at.”

And its essential appeal hasn’t gone anywhere. “We do still want to spend an hour with personalities somewhere,” says Herzog. “They’re called podcasts. They’re the bastard child of late night and Howard Stern and where we now get our deep dives and daily takes.”

What we lose is the shared cultural touchstones, the ability to agree on a point of reference, if not a point of view. But media fragmentation and digital tribalism were already facts of life. The demise of late night isn’t what’s dividing us — it simply reflects how divided we already are.

This story appeared in the Aug. 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.