Late-Night Hosts Return From Break to Heightened Political Pressure

The new week in late-night television begins tonight, with several of the chief residents of that community returning from a brief respite away from living under the ever-present threat of another eruption from the mouth of their personal Vesuvius.

And the first thing they will surely notice is that the residue of damage from last week’s flow of hot, gaseous MAG(m)A has not cooled.

Stephen Colbert had a guest forced off his CBS show. Bill Maher moved back into the “low-rent, low-life” circle of presidential infamy. Colbert was denigrated as a sad-and-wan has-been by a man nobody had ever heard of until he started taking orders from his Don for regulatory hits on late-night hosts.

And a network—CBS—decided once again that obeisance-in-advance was the better part of CYA.

When the hosts step back onto their stages tonight, the first night of normal business after the conclusion of the Winter Olympics, they will be accompanied once again by the awareness that a week spent away from the slash-and-burn battle for free speech is exponentially more consequential than a weekend away, which is usually good all by itself for a bucket-load of gob-smacking developments.

On top of everything else, Trump’s smackdown by the Supreme Court of his tariff scheme—and his what’s-up-with-Grandpa move to send a hospital boat to Greenland because one U.S. submariner needed care in nearby Nuuk—offer fresh meat for chewing over.

For Seth Meyers, who has been off the radar for two weeks, it may feel like trying to follow the plot of a movie he fell asleep watching during the first reel.

“Wait a second. Suddenly our guest bookings are subject to government approval? Did Putin show up and take this movie in a whole new direction?”

It isn’t Putin who did that, but a bit player named Brendan Carr, the chosen one for President Trump as FCC chairman in the President’s pursuit to rid himself of any quarrelsome late-hours critics.

Carr once again inserted himself into what late-night hosts can do and say when he lifted a finger and CBS jumped at his pronouncement that the equal-time exemption for late-night (and daytime) TV talk shows—and not talk broadcasts of almost any other variety—was over, and with it the freedom to book guests who are running for office without triggering the need to invite their opponents.

That this was clearly a shot at Colbert escaped nobody, especially Stephen, who took a shot of his own at CBS management—the ones who canceled his Late Show as of May.

A big spotlight tonight will certainly be on Jimmy Kimmel, who remains at the top of the Carr kill list following last year’s effort to force ABC stations to yank him off the air.

Kimmel may have reason for concern because of CBS’s instant capitulation to Carr’s selective regulatory zeal. He got backing from his network the last time around. If Carr had come after him again this time, before CBS’s genuflection, ABC might have had a stiffer spine.

Now there’s already a network saying it’s happy to go along.

ABC is facing similar FCC pressure over its daytime talk show, The View. Notably, both of these actions come with no corresponding pressure on conservative radio talk shows all over the country.

Will Kimmel address the situation tonight? He has shown no movement backward from Carr or Trump to this point. Both men should pack a shield before they tune in.

Bill Maher doesn’t have to worry about avoiding Carr’s equal-time big stick because he’s safe from FCC interference as a star on HBO—a cable, not broadcast, network. But he has managed to incur the scattershot wrath of the President of the United States because he continues to make jokes about him (aka: his job).

Clearly, Maher enjoyed being called a jerk, an overrated lightweight, and a nervous-nelly in need of some liquid courage before the dinner he shared with Trump at the White House last year no more than any of his fellow hosts have after similar ad hominem rants.

This week on Real Time, he ruefully acknowledged waking up last Saturday to a “blistering social media text” from Trump, which dropped those not-so-bon mots on his head, including an accusation of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

That’s Trump’s catch-all for anyone who doesn’t agree with his “sometimes bat-shit agenda”—the label Maher used on his show Friday night.

He promised to address this false mental health accusation on his next show, though it’s pretty clear by now that if you perform the function of late-night host and tell jokes that satirize things like Trump’s suggestion that China is going to force Canada to give up hockey—as Maher did when he earned that presidential blister—you must be the deranged one.

Even as he did some blistering of his own against his network, Colbert never sounded deranged. If anything, his move to slide his interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico to YouTube was the opposite. As in: brilliant.

Colbert’s interview with the previously little-known Texas state rep is now the show’s most-viewed in more than three years. Only a different sort of derangement would write that off as “low-rated.”

The central event of the coming week is the live edition of The Late Show that Colbert is planning to follow Trump’s State of the Union address on Tuesday. A live show for that occasion has been a tradition for Colbert, and he has pointed with anticipation to this one as his last as CBS’s late-night star.

It comes three months before Colbert’s end date on CBS. He has not talked about his plans for his finale, but there might be some sweet synergy in doing his own State of the Union that night.

Because the view from late night is clearly much cloudier than the one Trump sees when he wanders to that window over the demolition site he is supervising.

Maybe Stephen could even do one last live edition of The Late Show that night.

Here’s betting it will get the show’s highest ratings in years—perhaps ever.

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