Scott Pinsker: CBS's Decision to Leave Colbert On the Air Even Though He's Cancelled Puts Them In a Stinky Howard-Stern Hole

Scott Pinsker recalls that Stern announced he was quitting terrestrial radio in 2004, but remained on the air through 2005.

He used this time to bash the station he was still employed by and broadcasting from.

After discussing Stern's descent into farty irrelevance, Pinsker writes:

Stern's audience is a pitiful sliver of what it once was.

And eventually, that'll be Stephen Colbert's fate, too. But don't focus on that yet: The important part is what happened after Stern announced he'd be leaving terrestrial radio (Oct. 6, 2004) but before he actually left on Dec. 16, 2005.

Stern spent much of his final months on terrestrial radio hyping up how awesome his new satellite radio show was gonna be (often by throwing shade at traditional radio). It led to a 43-page CBS lawsuit for "[misappropriating] millions of dollars' worth of CBS Radio air time for his own financial benefit." (The lawsuit was later settled, with Sirius paying CBS Radio a few million bucks, while also receiving rights to rebroadcast Stern's old radio tapes.)

In retrospect, nobody at CBS should've been surprised: Of course Stern was gonna hype up his move to satellite! His new financial model depended on it! (Indeed, Stern later sued Sirius XM -- and lost -- when he demanded a payment of $300 million for the new subscribers gained via the Sirius-XM merger.)

Indeed, Colbert is already doing this, one single day after he was told he was cancelled.

He's already priming his small audience for whatever political talk show he's planning next, whether it's a podcast or an MSNBC gig called Maddow's Doppleganger.

For the next ten months, it's going to be little but Colbert telling Trump "f*** you," and, as he nears the end of the ten months, telling CBS, Paramount, and SkyDance "f*** you."

CBS late night host Stephen Colbert didn't mince any words Monday night about his show's cancellation, telling the president off in coarse fashion to audience cheers.

During the opening monologue of "The Late Show," Colbert dished on what led to CBS' decision to end his show and gave President Donald Trump a few jabs, joking that he won't be holding back now that his show's on borrowed time.

"And now for the next ten months, the gloves are off," he said, "I can finally speak unvarnished truth to power, and say what I really think about Donald Trump starting right now. I don't care for him."

I think he's being ironic. I sure hope he's not so deluded to think that he's previously been a professional and avoided making his hyperpartisan feelings public.

Elsewhere, Colbert fired back at Trump for celebrating his show's cancellation.

"I absolutely love that Colbert got fired," Trump wrote on Truth Social Thursday night. "His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show."

"How dare you, sir?" Colbert responded on-air. "Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism? Go f--- yourself."

The liberal audience cheered loudly in response.

He's previewing his podcast or MSNBC show, of course. When he starts his podcast or MSNBC show, he'll have a much smaller budget and a smaller audience. But he needs to really excite that small audience so that they follow him into his next demented venture.

This is why I said that CBS would find a way to get rid of Colbert early. Both parties will claim that the decision to end the show early is "mutual," but it will in fact be caused by Colbert hate-casting to his small core of actual fans to ready them to pay $20 a month for his podcast, while making his show almost entirely unwatchable except for the 10,000 mental cases in the country willing to pay actual money to watch Stephen Colbert.

MXMNews digests a paywalled PJ Media essay by Brandon Morse.

Although he was at first rewarded for pandering to Trump-deranged lefties who needed their lunatic hatreds validated, his fortunes quickly turned.

All of that changed, Morse argues, when Donald Trump was elected in 2016. That moment "broke" Colbert. "He got caught up in the Trump Derangement Syndrome," Morse wrote, likening the shift to "a grown toddler... thrashing around." It was a profitable tantrum--initially. Colbert surged in ratings, surpassing Jimmy Fallon, and solidified his identity as late-night TV's chief anti-Trump spokesman. One infamous lowlight came when he called Trump "Putin's c**k holster"--a moment that Morse rightly highlighted as grotesque and illustrative of the descent into hyperpartisan theatrics.

But as the Trump presidency gave way to Joe Biden's, the ratings began to nosedive. Morse argues that Colbert's unwillingness to pivot cost him his audience. "As dissatisfaction with the [Biden] administration grew," Morse wrote, "its cheerleaders began losing popularity alongside it." Viewership cratered once President Trump returned to the political stage, not as a media punching bag, but as a resilient contender demonstrating the glaring incompetence of Democrat rule.

Morse raises the provocative but fair question: "What would Colbert have been without Donald Trump?" Had he chosen a more moderate, inclusive comedic path, he might have evolved into a modern-day Carson or Leno. Instead, Morse concludes, Colbert "jump[ed] onto a political trend that paid off at first, but ultimately became divisive and unpopular."

I disagree. I never thought Colbert was funny. He was funny-ish on Strangers with Candy. But that show was basically the same joke told over and over. Yes, it was a good joke, and I enjoyed it for the first season. But it was just one joke. It can't last.

So yes, Stephen Colbert did have one funny joke in him. I don't think you can build a career as a comedian on one single funny joke.

Emily Jashinski talked about this situation. She points out that network television talk shows used to be intended for a mass audience.

But Colbert and the rest of the late night no-ratings punks pursued a different audience: a micro audience. There's a reason for that; narrowcasting to a small, select group makes that group feel special and valued, and will be more loyal. Kind of like how people love small unknown bands until they find broader appeal, in which case they've "sold out" and no one likes them anymore (except for the millions of new fans).

I'm pursuing a similar strategy, tailoring my message to the small but passionate group of readers who understand that JackStraw is a dirty drug addict homeless Sea Hobo and garrett is so gay he drives the ghost of Jm J. Bullock to haunt the Grindr servers texting eerie homophobic slurs.

But obviously, you cannot pursue this micro-targeted strategy while collecting a salary of $15-20 million per year and paying $100 million per year on a writing staff of 21 people plus something like a hundred crew (camera men, lighting, makeup and hair, publicity, etc., etc.)

If you want to micro-target, your budget must be micro-sized.

And yet all of the late night "comedy" clowns have pursued a smaller and smaller segment of the audience while spending $100 million per year or more.

Adam Carolla talks about this complete disconnect between payroll and potential audience. He points out that Greg Gutfeld's show is "lean and mean" with no writers room -- I think he's wrong about that, I think Gutfeld has a handful of writers -- and no dedicated studio. (They just re-decorate The Five's studio every day.)

And yet Gutfeld's ratings are much better than Colbert's, with a tiny budget to match Gutfeld's tiny stature. (Got 'im!)

It's just incredible that they all pursued the same strategy of guaranteed failure, and even more incredible that the "suits" who are supposed to be sober, competent professionals permitted them to do so or even encouraged them to do so -- that's how strong corporate media Trump derangement is.

Late night used to be a cash-cow for the networks -- the shows were cheap-ish despite being on most weeknights of the year, but brought in big ratings. That's why there was such drama over the Leno-Letterman struggle and the Leno-Conan putsch. And why CBS was willing to break the bank to give Letterman whatever he wanted. Just to get a piece of that late night income stream.

Remember when late night pulled in such good ratings that NBC launched a show at the unheard-of timeslot of 12:30? The old Letterman slot? And then CBS followed with Craig Ferguson?

And then they colonized the 1:30 am slot as well with Carson Daly and other late, late night hosts?

But now nobody is watching.

If NBC decided to drop Jimmy Fallon from the Tonight Show and seek a new host: Would you even care?

No, you wouldn't.

In past years people would follow the news about late night hirings and firings.

No one cares about this nonsense any longer.

I saw a video by a YouTuber called Captain Midnight who states the obvious: This isn't about late night television. Late night tv is just the canary in the coalmine, the first to die.

Yes, late night television is going away. When it all shakes out, all of the current "comedy" hosts will be fired. All networks will abandon original programming in these timeslots except for one. Probably NBC, because they have such a longstanding corporate commitment to late night programming. They've been doing the Tonight Show since the 1950s. And that single show will post meh ratings and be borderline profitable as long as they keep the budgets low and have no competition from other channels to split the small audience.

Ed Morrissey quotes from a NYT article about the death of Regime "Comedy:"

"The Late Show," a fixture of the network for over three decades, was racking up losses of tens of millions of dollars a year, and the gap was growing fast, according to two people familiar with the show's finances. Like other late-night shows before it, "The Late Show" was canceled when the network could not figure how to make the finances work in an entertainment world increasingly dominated by streaming.

So as CBS executives mapped out the schedule and budget for next year, George Cheeks, CBS's president, decided in recent weeks that the network couldn't take those losses any more, the two people said. Mr. Colbert learned of the decision on Wednesday night. Shari Redstone, the controlling shareholder of Paramount, CBS's parent company, learned about it on Thursday, according to two other people.

...

Over the past couple of years, many of the surviving late-night shows cut their budgets. Network late-night shows now generally produce four new episodes a week, down from five, in an attempt to save money. "Late Night With Seth Meyers" now frequently tapes two episodes on Mondays to limit filming to three days a week.

"The Late Show" began losing money at least three years ago, two people familiar with the finances said. Like "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" on NBC, it cost more than $100 million a year to produce. CBS executives weighed the possibility of trying to find ways to sharply reduce its budget but, amid the mounting losses, concluded that there was not a viable path to profitability, one of the people said.

But it's not just about late night. All of television is collapsing. This is about the networks. Prime time is going to be contracted, maybe just 8pm to 10pm, the way Fox used to do it when they were just starting out, with a 10pm news cast or some kind of cheap syndicated tv shows. Eventually someone will start running Korean soap operas at 11:30, paying peanuts for the license rights.

And then little by little, the networks will just wither. I don't think they'll go away completely, but they'll be so unimportant that no one bothers talking about them any longer.

Even Andrew Breitbart will just get bored of gloating in heaven, and then he'll move on.

Could this have been avoided? Could network TV have saved itself by focusing on a mass, not micro, audience? Avoiding divisive hard-left extremist political messaging?

I don't know. Has anyone noticed, as I do a lot, that there are very few shows even made any more that have a neutral gender skew? There used to be. There used to be a lot of shows that men and women (and even kids) could agree on: broad, light comedies, police procedurals, etc.

Do you, like me, find it's difficult to find something that can appeal to both yourself an a significant other of the opposite sex?

Almost now every entertainment is atomized and made for one highly-specific target audience. Shows no longer seem interested in attracting a broad audience, only a loyal micro-audience.

And I think this is a real driver of division and toxicity in our society. We just don't enjoy the same things any longer. We have less and less in common.

And I can't say that's the TV executives' fault, because we've all collectively decided that it's not worth it to watch a broadly-appealing, but kinda bland, entertainment with our spouses and children, but that we'd all rather just retreat into separate rooms to watch individually-tailored fare on the computer or TV.

posted by Ace at 02:32 PM

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