Colbert takes final bow, a late-night casualty of the president who couldn’t take a joke |
Colbert takes final bow, a late-night casualty of the president who couldn’t take a joke
May 22, 2026 — 4:28pm
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Back in the day, the late-night talk show landscape in the US was a snake pit. Genial Johnny Carson had sharp elbows behind the scenes, and no comedian or movie studio with stars to promote wanted to get on his bad side. When his protegé Joan Rivers started a competing late-night show, Carson iced her out permanently. (The premise of the Emmy-award winning Hacks has echoes of Rivers’ career.)
And then came the famous late-night wars between NBC’s Jay Leno and CBS’s David Letterman, with Conan O’Brien caught in the crossfire. This spawned a best-selling book and a noted TV movie.
Today, things are a lot different. There’s a whole spectrum of late-night hosts – though, in classic Hollywood fashion, they are all white guys, none of them even Jewish – and they are all gushing BFFs.
Still, each has a distinct identity: ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel is the workingman’s late-night host, with roots in American football and bro-centric comedy. Jimmy Fallon, on NBC, is a Saturday Night Live vet whose facile comedic and musical talents can’t quite disguise the fact that he is late-night’s least talented sibling. Then there’s Seth Meyers, host of a late-late show on NBC, who has a deceptively casual intellectual cast; he’s the late-night host who does the Times crossword every day. Along for the ride is Brit John Oliver, an alum from Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, who oversees an unusual weekly HBO show that combines comedy and investigative journalism.
And looking over them all with affection are their semi-retired forebears, the sainted Letterman, Stewart and O’Brien.
But of course, this week all eyes have been on........