Maybe the oldest and phoniest trope in talk-show television is the introduction of “my close personal friend, so and so!”
Who really believes a talk-show host has dozens of close personal show-biz friends?
And yet Stephen Colbert seems to have at least four of them: friends who have also been his competitors—in the ratings much of the time, and in their shared field at all times. All profess to love him, and he them.
The affection among this group—Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, and Colbert—was on utterly convincing display Monday night on Colbert’s Late Show, as the gang from the 2023 writers strike podcast Strike Force Five reunited to give the CBS host a unified send-off, and to register their joint disapproval of the circumstances surrounding his departure from late night.
This group long ago shattered the old late-night precedent that competition had to resemble Game of Thrones, complete with clanging swords and ritual beheadings—symbolic ones, anyway.
Back in the day, guest bookings were a bloodsport, with certain celebs finding themselves banned from the right show if they went on the wrong show first. Ratings were parsed like WAR, OPS+ and other indecipherable stats in baseball.
These gents, on the other hand, go fishing together. (Some of them anyway.)
The mutual-admiration festival predates the solidarity they now feel as targets of a vengeful government with an extremely low tolerance for satire. So it wasn’t just a very serious and vigorous defense of the First Amendment that brought them to Colbert’s extra-long couch last night.
Though that was certainly in the air.
The banter was funny and charming, but a little concern about the future was always haunting the conversation. It emerged early when Colbert followed a skillful joke—that Jon Stewart was the “designated survivor” with all the rest of big-time late-night talent there in one room—with the observation: “Someone has to survive for the President to be mad at.”
He also asked if the others had ever imagined doing a job the President would have “strong feelings about.” That was a gentle way of describing a job the President would pressure the chairman of the FCC to help eradicate from American life.
The undercurrent of anger surfaced when Colbert asked if there was any topic they hadn’t touched on, and Kimmel supplied the most direct answer: “The outrage that your show is being thrown off the air?”
Earlier Colbert had said he relegated Kimmel to the far end of the couch because he was the most “aggressive”—and he’s not wrong. Kimmel’s passion is well-earned. He has taken more than his share of slings and arrows from inside the White House—and from FCC headquarters.
But it was Colbert’s wound that turned out to be (professionally) fatal, leaving Kimmel the chief remaining target.
Kimmel pushed for “angry Stephen to come out” and “go nuts.” Colbert has steadfastly aimed to sail above what surely had to be the most crushing setback of his career. But last night he acknowledged “I was quite surprised” by the decision to cancel him. (He was surprised enough to say it twice.)
Taken together, it sounded as if the hostility that once defined late-night competition has been commandeered and relocated. It is now coming from outside the house—which is to say, inside the White House.
And as these five talented men traded jibes and stories like old college friends, drawing laughs from the audience and from one another, it only underscored how separate—sadly separate—Trump and his entourage are from some of the best times people can have watching television.
Watching that engaging bonhomie must also have felt painful for those at CBS who understand how central a late-night show has long been to the identity and stature of a broadcast network. The new ownership clearly doesn’t care about that, because it doesn’t seem to value what a show like Colbert’s brings to the larger enterprise.
Late-night shows are entertaining. They always have been; they still are. Unless you literally can’t take a joke.
The guys who shared the stage last night did not look like terrorists, or dangerous in any way. They looked like five white guys of vaguely the same age and almost exactly the same height, wearing similar blue suits—except Fallon, who wore black. Guys who have fun together.
The group was going to tape a new episode of the Strike Force after the show. Maybe that will be the last time they are together like this professionally—though other cancellations may be in the future if the companies that own their shows don’t stand behind them.
But the relationships seem likely to go on. Kimmel even offered Colbert a chance to host his show.
It was a joke—sort of—but no one should be surprised if it actually happens.
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