Let’s say you decided during an all-hands company meeting to publicly accuse your bosses of being bribed. You have no evidence to back up this claim, but you go ahead and attempt to humiliate them on a daily basis anyway.
Let’s also say you’re running a division in the company that is losing $40 million per year. You have a bloated staff of more than 100 people while your competitor has a staff of less than 10 to produce a rival product, and that competitor is kicking your butt while actually making money for its parent company.
And then let’s say your job is to make people laugh. But instead, you just go on angry screeds day after day while focusing on one person for 10 straight years.
Add it all up:
— You’re a petulant, insubordinate employee who routinely rips your superiors
— You’re also losing your company boatloads of cash
— And you’re not doing the job you were tasked to do by actually producing comedy
Should you be fired?
Or should you keep your job for another 10 months and continue to cost the company tens of millions of dollars, while criticizing the very people paying you in the most personal and sophomoric ways possible?
Apparently, for CBS and Paramount, the plan is to do the latter and keep Stephen Colbert on the air until next May.
That said, know this: If I were running that network, Colbert would’ve already been fired. And to quote The Godfather, it’s nothing personal, just business.
How could I continue to hemorrhage money and allow my late-night host to make a spectacle of my network for the next 40 weeks? Why not simply pay out this contract and save $20 million annually by turning the page on what has been the biggest embarrassment to late-night television we have ever witnessed?
For some odd reason, it somehow costs $2.5 million per episode to produce The Late Show with Stephen Colbert each night. How can that be? Ninety-five percent of the show involves two people having a conversation. So where is all that money being spent exactly?
You could put two YouTubers speaking to each other at a desk for almost no cost, and offer content more interesting than Colbert talking to Bernie Sanders (I-VT) or Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) about fighting the oligarchy.
Overall, Colbert’s show costs $130 million annually to produce, which is easily the highest of any program at CBS.
Meanwhile, Colbert is finishing a distant second to Fox’s Greg Gutfeld and has for some time now. In a related story, Gutfeld’s entire staff is a fraction of that of Colbert’s, making it infinitely cheaper to produce. And Gutfeld’s show is actually funny and often books comedians as its guests and, for the most part, it provides levity and perspective on pop culture issues and people instead of myopically lecturing audiences about the alleged threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.
Recently, Paramount and CBS settled a lawsuit with President Donald Trump for $16 million. The company got off easy, considering what Trump had rightly alleged: 60 Minutes, the CBS News broadcast news magazine, had deceptively edited an interview with (installed) Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to make her sound cogent.
CBS refused to release the transcript for months because they knew it would implicate the program of exactly what Trump had alleged: a clear attempt at election interference by literally replacing one answer by their preferred candidate with another.
Nonetheless, because Trump is involved, Colbert has accused executives at Paramount and CBS of being bought off.
“I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: It’s a big, fat bribe,” Colbert claimed directly to the camera on The Late Show last week.
On Monday, after a full weekend of mostly sympathetic media coverage of his cancellation, Colbert went back on the air Monday night to deliver a message to Trump after the president celebrated the news of his eventual ouster.
“How dare you, sir? Would an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism?” Colbert asked, before turning to the camera and saying, “Go f*** yourself!”
That sound you hear is Johnny Carson turning over in his grave. Is this supposed to be funny? And it’s a long way from Colbert’s touching monologue following Trump’s victory in the 2016 election.
“How did our politics get so poisonous?” he asked during a special that included him crying over Trump’s improbable victory? “I think it’s because we overdosed, especially this year. We drank too much of the poison.”
Talk about a person in need of a mirror. For 10 years, poison can only describe the content of Colbert’s show, which has included him comparing Trump supporters to the Taliban, repeatedly mocking first lady Melania Trump, and offering nightly accusations of Trump himself being an agent of Russia and a sexual puppet of Putin’s.
Yep, not poisonous at all.
On Tuesday night, Colbert continued to pound his bosses, calling CBS “morally bankrupt” while insisting his firing had nothing to do with the $40 million Colbert was losing for the company each year.
“One bright spot for Trump in the news right now is how much he’s making my network crawl,” he said to cheers from the studio audience.
Kevin O’Leary, a highly successful businessman and investor and a staple on cable news for his common-sense analysis, said this of Colbert’s accusatory rhetoric.
“You don’t insult your boss before cashing your check. If I ran CBS, I’d fire him in four seconds. Let him sue. If you’re not funny and you’re bleeding money, you’re gone,” he told CNN.
Colbert’s fans posing as journalists in the media don’t feel the same way, framing the firing as a free speech problem.
Salon headline: “If a comedian can’t make jokes about the president, who can?”
CNN’s Brian Stelter: “A country where you can’t lampoon the president is not a free country. Of course, we’re not there, not even close, in the U.S., but there’s a bit of a chill in the air today.”
Former NPR Chief Vivian Schiller: “We have to make note that Stephen Colbert is unafraid to, again, speak truth to power. He does it in a very bipartisan way over the years, and comedy and parody is an important part of a democratic ecosystem.”
Wait, what? Colbert “does it in a very bipartisan way?” What planet does she live on?
A Media Research Center study reviewed every joke on late-night television from Sept. 3 through Oct. 25, leading up to the 2024 presidential election, told by Colbert, NBC’s Seth Meyers, and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel. Of 1,463 jokes, 1,428 targeted Trump, or 98% of all jokes.
That’s about as “bipartisan” as NPR’s content.
In the end, just look at the numbers. On Tuesday night, Colbert, despite massive media coverage and being billed as a maverick martyr on his way out the door, drew just 2.3 million total viewers. In the key 25 to 54 demographic that advertisers base their ad buys on, he drew just 252,000 viewers.
For contrast, Gutfeld drew 3.1 million viewers, or 800,00 more, and 300,000 in the key demographic despite Fox News being in fewer homes than CBS.
This ain’t about the First Amendment. This ain’t about Trump suddenly being offended by a comic who has targeted him for more than 10 years.
This is about performance. It’s also about class.
Stephen Colbert’s performance has been pitiful. The millions lost by CBS underscore that perfectly.
As for class, Colbert is also lacking in that department.
CBS and Paramount shouldn’t put up with a public smear campaign by their most disgruntled employee for even one more day.
MAKE LATE NIGHT TV SHOWS FUNNY AGAIN
Show Stephen the door.
Because that appears to be exactly what he wants.
