The New York Times has a lengthy report about what’s going on at The Late Show on CBS since Stephen Colbert took over for David Letterman nearly a year ago. The Times’s write-up bends over backwards to put a brave face on it, but Colbert’s show thus far has been a pretty big failure. CBS just hired a new executive producer to fix the show, and the ratings aren’t good:
It’s worse than that sounds when you consider how much CBS has invested in Colbert and how profitable The Late Show was when Letterman was at the helm. Of course, Times media critic Jim Rutenberg has nothing but wonderful things to say about Colbert, which leads to a lot of cognitive dissonance in attempting to explain why the show isn’t, in his words, “clicking”:
While Colbert is a talented comedian, and his vocal profession of his Christian faith is an interesting and admirable personal wrinkle, Rutenberg is skating over a pretty obvious explanation for Colbert’s failure to capture America’s heart. To the extent that Colbert was “a leading voice in American political satire,” he was a hero to the cultural left.
Before he came to CBS, The Colbert Report on Comedy Central was little more than an extended bit of performance art that did little but caricature conservatives and did so in a way that wasn’t nearly as clever as the New York Times’s newsroom thought. Where Rutenberg talks of Colbert’s “integrity, grace and wicked intelligence,” he’s glossing over the fact that much of his potential audience saw what he was doing as unbridled sanctimony in the service of a narrow political agenda.
By contrast, Jimmy Fallon mostly plays it very broadly and apolitically. (I half believe Fallon’s decision to let Yoko Ono come on TV and caterwaul about the supposed evils of fracking was an in-kind contribution to America’s energy producers.) Kimmel, on the other hand, doesn’t shy away from politics—but he’s also not afraid to play to both sides of the fence. You don’t see too many other comedians these days go off on Obamacare, with damning and funny results.
And along these lines, the other big mistake CBS made was assuming that the fact Colbert and Jon Stewart generated dedicated following among influential liberals would translate into a mass audience. On Comedy Central, Colbert had an audience of just over a million people a night. On Fox News, Bill O’Reilly—who Colbert was explicitly satirizing—averaged almost three times Colbert’s audience. Yet, it seems nearly impossible to imagine a major network rolling the dice on giving a Fox News host a similarly high profile own show, even when their ability to draw eyeballs is demonstrably better.
Colbert may yet succeed. While Fallon was well-known before taking over The Tonight Show, Kimmel was also a marginal basic cable comedian who slowly built an audience; and he did it with much less fanfare and promotional support than Colbert seems to have received.
Still, it’s remarkable that the media establishment is such a liberal echo chamber that they seem mystified by the fact that a guy who forged his career mocking the mores and politics of half the country has yet to become a broadly popular television personality.
