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    Canceling ‘The Late Show’ Is Bad News for Late-Night TV, not Stephen Colbert

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    The art form was already in decline; this may hasten its demise. But don’t fret about the host. His talents are better showcased elsewhere.Getting canceled may end up being the best thing that ever happened to Stephen Colbert. The same cannot be said for its impact on late night television.Consider that Conan O’Brien turned into a folk hero after NBC took away his time slot and that David Letterman hit the height of his popularity after he didn’t get the job as host of “The Tonight Show.” Until last week, Colbert, host of “The Late Show,” was the ratings leader of an art form in decline.Then CBS, citing economic issues, announced that his program would go off the air next May, news that came at a time when its corporate parent, Paramount, needs the government’s approval for a merger with the Skydance company. Now Colbert, one of the most prominent critics of President Trump, seems to many like a comedic martyr. For the next 10 months, his show will have a spotlight in a way it never has before. He will not only have a chance to continue to make fun of the president, but he also will be setting himself up for his next act.Marrying a pugilistic comedic streak with courtly manners, Colbert became the finest conversationalist of the current hosts and his political monologues helped him become a ratings leader. He respected the history and conventions of late-night television, perhaps to a fault. But you also got the sense that “The Late Show” wasn’t always the perfect showcase for his myriad talents.His quick, improv-honed wit and intellectual depth could feel hamstrung by the show’s short segments. And sometimes when he got on a good riff or dug into an area of major interest (Tolkien, faith, the history of comedy), you wondered if it would fit better on a podcast.Before taking the job, Colbert developed an elite reputation in comedy circles as a Second City performer, a comedy writer and a correspondent on “The Daily Show.” But mostly he was known for “The Colbert Report,” an inspired and singular reinvention of the late-night form whose greatness has already been overshadowed by his later work. Satirizing a blowhard conservative pundit through entire episodes, he somehow managed to lead guests nimbly into arguments, making jokes and serious points at the same time. He conveyed a clear point of view while often saying the opposite. Improvising multiple layers of meaning, he pulled off one of the great comedic feats of this century.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Why Is Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ Getting Canceled?

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      Maybe the “Late Show” decision is purely financial. But after Paramount’s cave over “60 Minutes,” it is hard to trust.In 2005, on his satire “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness,” meaning a statement that was not actually true but represented a reality that the speaker wished to inhabit.In 2015, Colbert replaced David Letterman on CBS’s “Late Show,” which under him became one of the biggest and most prolific launchers of satirically guided missiles during the Trump era. In 2024, President Trump — who has repeatedly bemoaned his late-night coverage — said CBS “should terminate his contract.”Now, in 2025, CBS has said that it is canceling Colbert’s show at the end of its season, next May. Executives stressed, in the announcement, that the cut was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”Is that the truth, or merely truthy?There is good reason that CBS would need to offer that assurance. The network’s parent company, Paramount, just this month settled a lawsuit from President Trump, over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, for $16 million. At the same time, Paramount was hoping to close a multibillion-dollar merger with the company Skydance, which required the approval of the Trump administration.Many legal experts said the deal was an unnecessary concession in a frivolous case. At minimum it undermined one of TV journalism’s most accomplished independent voices. Some people called it “a big, fat bribe” — actually, those were Colbert’s words, in a blistering monologue a few days ago, which also mentioned speculation that CBS’s future owners might try to rein him in.Talk show hosts have bitten the hand that signs the contracts before; Letterman needled NBC and its then-parent, General Electric. But back then, the issues did not involve conflicts with a president willing to pull any necessary levers to punish and influence media outlets.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Alt Comedy Is Dead. Long Live Alt Comedy!

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      The term has fallen out of fashion, but the experimental spirit of the genre lives on in the refreshingly off-kilter Brent Weinbach and Eddie Pepitone.If Nathan Fielder performed stand-up comedy, he might look something like Brent Weinbach.It’s not only that Weinbach maintains an impenetrable deadpan or seeks out awkward silence (“Round of applause if there are any gay people in the closet here tonight”) or builds jokes around overly elaborate setups. His new special, “Popular Culture” (YouTube), also exploits the central conceit of Fielder’s “The Rehearsal,” including several bits where Weinbach prepares for a future event with a practice run. To get ready for fatherhood, for instance, he acts out responses to discovering his daughter smoking marijuana. Things get weird.Weinbach’s hour, a very funny collection of eccentric impressions, oddball advice and flights of fancy, would have once been quickly classified as alternative comedy. So would the new special from Eddie Pepitone, “The Collapse” (Veeps). That term has fallen out of fashion in part because it became too vague, and yet I increasingly find myself missing it. All genre designations rely on simplifications, but they provide a useful shorthand that helps audiences navigate a vast culture.Alternative comedy meant theatrical novelty to some, indulgence to others. But for a couple of decades starting in the 1990s, it signaled something more specific. Weinbach and Pepitone, both Los Angeles-based comedians, are wildly different in sensibility, not to mention volume. Weinbach’s equanimity evokes that of a TV weatherman; Pepitone projects the chaotic energy of a thunderstorm. But they share the spirit of classic alt comedy: experimental, self-aware, at odds with conventional style and notions of success.Weinbach’s first special, which closed with his pitch-perfect impression of generic stand-up, was called “Appealing to the Mainstream” (2017). Pepitone made “For the Masses” three years later. These titles are tongue-in-cheek, pointedly.“I’m not a mainstream guy,” Pepitone says more directly in his new special, later adding that people ask him if he has seen the new Marvel movie and he balks: “I only watch extremely independent movies from places with no drinkable water.”There’s a touch of the professional wrestling heel in Eddie Pepitone’s comedy.Peter BonnelloWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ Is Being Canceled by CBS

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      The show will end in May, the network said, calling it “a purely financial decision.”In a decision that shocked the entertainment industry and comedy world, CBS said on Thursday that it was canceling the most-watched show in late night, “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” and ending a franchise that has existed for more than three decades.Mr. Colbert’s run — and “The Late Show” itself — will end in May after his contract expires.CBS executives said in a statement that the cancellation was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.”“It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount,” said the executives, who included George Cheeks, the president of CBS and a co-chief executive of Paramount, CBS’s parent. “Our admiration, affection and respect for the talents of Stephen Colbert and his incredible team made this agonizing decision even more difficult.”Paramount is in the midst of closing a multibillion-dollar merger with the movie studio Skydance, a deal that requires approval from the Trump administration. Paramount recently agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over an interview on “60 Minutes,” a move Mr. Colbert criticized on his show as “a big fat bribe.” The merger still requires the approval of the Federal Communications Commission.Mr. Colbert said during the taping of “The Late Show” on Thursday that he was informed of the decision on Wednesday night. When his studio audience unleashed a chorus of boos upon hearing the news, Mr. Colbert said, “Yeah, I share your feelings.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares159 Views

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      ‘The Studio’ Ties Emmys Record for Most Comedy Nominations in a Season

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      Past winners like “Hacks” and “The Bear” lost some ground this year, making Apple TV+’s Hollywood satire starring Seth Rogen the one to beat.Season 1 of Apple TV+’s star-studded Hollywood satire “The Studio,” starring Seth Rogen as the beleaguered head of a fictional movie studio, became the comedy to beat on Tuesday for the 77th Emmy Awards, receiving 23 nominations.The nominations tie it with Season 2 of “The Bear” for the most-nominated season of a comedy series ever heading into the final voting round, which begins on Aug. 18. The award ceremony is scheduled for Sept. 14.Created by Rogen with his longtime creative partner, Evan Goldberg (along with Peter Huyck, Alex Gregory and Frida Perez), “The Studio” seemed, in many ways, perfectly engineered to succeed. For a comedy, it is exceptionally ambitious and well made — beautifully shot and elaborately choreographed, with most scenes filmed as extended single takes, or “oners” in the insider parlance of the show.The show is also, as befits a series from the comedians behind “Superbad,” “Pineapple Express” and “Sausage Party,” very funny, taking aim at the pettiness of executive strivers, the boundless self-regard of celebrities and the industry threats posed by Big Tech and Wall Street. Rogen’s character must fight to preserve his artistic integrity amid the often humiliating demands of his corporate overlords.“It knows its business well enough to be blisteringly entertaining,” The New York Times’s chief TV critic, James Poniewozik, wrote in his review of the series in March, adding: “When ‘The Studio’ is funny, it is funnier than most anything on TV now.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      The ‘Sex and the City’ Resurgence Has a Secret Ingredient: Contempt

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      The show’s sequel, now in its third season, subjects beloved characters to a parade of humiliations. It’s oddly captivating.When I think of my childhood, and the moments that would have made it difficult for my parents to imagine I was anything other than a latent homosexual, I see myself sitting pretzel-style at the foot of an almond-colored couch while my mother and her three best friends drink martinis and watch “Sex and the City.” I was too taken with the show’s glamour and prurience to register the uncanny dynamic: Here were four cosmopolitan 30-something women, mostly single or divorced, convening to watch television’s foremost avatars of 30-something cosmopolitanism discuss the vagaries of sex and dating. I could not possibly have felt as “seen” by Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte as my mother and her girlfriends probably did — but I did think of these ladies as fairy godmothers of a sort, telegraphing a future where I too might gather over frothy cocktails at trendy Manhattan establishments to debate the merits of bisexuality or golden showers.More than two decades later, we are experiencing a “Sex and the City” resurgence. First came the premiere, late in 2021, of a limp postscript of a show called “And Just Like That …,” which is currently trudging through its third season. Then, last year, the original series arrived on Netflix, introducing the show to younger viewers, who took more to its screwball cadence than its bygone sense of glamour. “Sex and the City,” they found, was bizarrely suitable to the tongue-in-cheek conventions of internetspeak, and so the show has lately birthed a whole litany of memes. In almost all of them, the characters are treated as objects of amusement, not aspiration.One clever joke poked fun at Carrie’s tendency to listen to her friends’ predicaments and then respond with exasperating recapitulations of her own. Charlotte remarks on, say, the earthquake that hit New York City last year. Miranda, always smug, insists that the Richter scale is obsolete, while Samantha, always horny, wisecracks about a man who made her walls shake. And of course Carrie, whose pick-me solipsism has become a point of fascination for newcomers, declares that “Big is moving to Paris!” — wrenching the conversation back to the emotionally unavailable tycoon who would torture her for years before dying, unceremoniously, of a Peloton-induced heart attack.This is how we’ve all come to regard the ladies of “Sex and the City,” even those of us for whom they once represented some pinnacle of refinement: They now read like parodies of themselves, characters we regard with a sort of loving derision. It’s a testament not only to the comforting rhythms of the sitcom format but also to this show’s genuine achievements in characterization: No matter how much these women annoy or exasperate us, we know them so intimately that we can always imagine, with a reasonable degree of both accuracy and scorn, how each might react to any given topic.And this is what makes “And Just Like That …” such a strange and fascinating product: It is a reboot that feels, at times, openly hostile to its own source material and even to the characters themselves. It cannot seem to resist subjecting them to mounting humiliations, either in a clumsy effort to atone for the minor sin of the original’s tone-deafness or, perhaps, because viewers actually want to see beloved characters tormented this way.The characters register as lab rats in a sadistic experiment with camp and caricature.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 150 Shares195 Views

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      How a Show About Truly Terrible People Became the Defining American Sitcom

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      As one of my last acts as a suburban teenager, about two weeks before moving out of my parents’ house for college, I watched the pilot episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” in my family’s living room. This would have been Aug. 4, 2005, a Thursday. A comedy about a group of malignant narcissists who own a trashy bar in Philly called Paddy’s, “Always Sunny” was, from Day 1, offensive even for an era in which offensiveness was so ingrained in our culture that it went largely unremarked upon. George W. Bush was seven months into his second term as president. You could still smoke in most bars. If you watched cable TV past 9 p.m., you would reliably see long infomercials for direct-to-video series like “Girls Gone Wild” or “Bumfights,” both of which were somehow less offensive than “Entourage,” then considered one of the smarter shows on HBO.Listen to this article, read by Robert PetkoffMy high school friends and I had all just received .edu email addresses from the colleges that accepted us, which was a prerequisite for joining a new social network called The Facebook, a website founded only the year before by a computer-science major in his Harvard dorm room; he made it shortly after creating another website, Facemash, a campuswide ranking system of female coeds by order of attractiveness. In a parking lot at NBC’s studios in Los Angeles, Donald Trump, who was the host of a reality show on that network, spoke into a hot mic during an interview with a host from “Access Hollywood” — who was George W. Bush’s first cousin — and remarked upon how he treats the women he encounters: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”You can do anything. That was just how it was then. “Always Sunny” stood out to me immediately as the greatest sendup of a time when the bad guys kept getting away with it and the ignorance of an American culture that was happy to let them. Being so young, I didn’t know at the time that this would remain an evergreen topic 20 years later. Nor did I realize that “Always Sunny” would become — as it begins its 17th season this month on FX — the longest-running live-action sitcom ever to appear on television by a fairly wide margin.Our very method of viewing TV has changed immeasurably and continually over this period. Being a chronic “Always Sunny” watcher, I can track time, in a big-picture sort of way, by recalling how I viewed certain seasons of the show — basic cable, DVD box set, pirated online, streaming. And I’ll forever remember the spring of 2025 as the year I interviewed the show’s main cast over a series of Zoom calls and watched its 17th season in an early-look unfinished copy somewhere deep in the bowels of the Disney corporation’s online library. Through everything — mergers, acquisitions, wars, a life-altering pandemic, seismic technological and ideological shifts — the show remained itself, on the same network, using the same sets and writers and production staff, with the same actors doing the same characters.The series creator, Rob McElhenney, plays Mac, a closeted and deeply insecure man who serves, poorly and unnecessarily (because there are rarely any customers), as the bar’s bouncer. Last month, McElhenney legally changed his last name to Mac. But Charlie Day has always shared a name with his character, Charlie, the bar’s janitor, an illiterate stalker who suffers from what the DSM-5 has labeled pica, or the compulsive consumption of inedible objects, especially viscous chemicals like paint, bleach and suntan lotion. Working behind the bar are Dee (Kaitlin Olson), a failed actress with no self-worth, and her fraternal twin, Dennis (Glenn Howerton), who is the closest thing the group has to a true leader but is also a Ted Bundy-esque tyrant who keeps a kill kit in a hidden compartment in the trunk of his car. Worst of all is Dennis and Dee’s father, Frank, played against type by national treasure Danny DeVito, who is a little bit of all of the above. In his first appearance on the show, as part of a story line in which all members of the main cast fake being disabled, each for a distinctly idiotic reason, he pretends to be paraplegic in order to receive special treatment from the dancers at a strip club.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Oasis Stayed on People’s Minds (by Fighting Online)

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      The band hasn’t played a show since 2009, but the quarreling Gallaghers kept their names in the news by mastering the art of the troll, on social media and beyond.Oasis is back, but in some senses it never left.The Manchester band, whose anthemic songs and sharp-tongued antics helped define the 1990s Britpop era, will return to the stage Friday in Cardiff, Wales, kicking off a global stadium tour. These will be the first Oasis shows since 2009, when the guitarist and primary songwriter Noel Gallagher quit the group, proclaiming that he could no longer stand to work with Liam Gallagher, the lead singer. The brothers, long known for their brawling, have not performed together since, yet they’ve rarely ceded the spotlight.“They definitely successfully kept themselves in the public eye during the whole breakup period,” said Simon Vozick-Levinson, Rolling Stone’s deputy music editor.The key to their continued relevance hasn’t just been enduring songs like “Wonderwall” and “Champagne Supernova,” but an uncanny ability to keep their famous bickering top of mind using modern tools that didn’t exist when the band’s 1994 debut arrived: social media and blogs.In the absence of Oasis, the Gallaghers released solo music, but also a barrage of insults and barbs via Liam’s eccentric social media posts and Noel’s dryly provocative interviews, all of it breathlessly documented, aggregated and amplified by British tabloids and the online music press. For listeners who discovered the band after it broke up, this constant hum of comedy and conflict has been a glimpse of the Oasis experience — a more potent distillation of the group’s essence than musical offshoots like Beady Eye and Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds.Noel Gallagher has mostly reserved his frank remarks for interviews, naming his price for an Oasis reunion or doling out insults off the cuff.Luke Brennan/Getty Images“The only little bits you could get of Oasis — it was their Twitter presence, it was their viral silliness, just their boneheaded attacks at each other online,” said Aidan O’Connell, 26, drummer for the Chicago indie-rock band Smut.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Will Sharpe, Star of Lena Dunham’s ‘Too Much,’ Is a Renaissance Man

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      When Will Sharpe arrived at Cambridge University in the mid-aughts, he was one of many undergraduates wanting to join Footlights, the storied sketch comedy troupe that had launched the careers of Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie and Emma Thompson. His friends thought it best to spend a few months figuring out what kind of comedy Footlights might favor before applying, but Sharpe wanted to jump right in.At a first-semester showcase open to nonmembers, Sharpe and his friends performed a wacky sketch that involved pretending to eat a tub of Vaseline by the handful. He was made a member and was later elected president of the troupe.Sharpe’s biweekly Footlights performances — which also included playing a white crayon that was sad it was never taken out of the box — “definitely encouraged a risk-taking attitude, because you could fail and try again, and fail and try again,” Sharpe recalled in an interview at a woodland cafe near his North London home.In the two decades since college, Sharpe, now 38, has tried — and often succeeded at — a variety of creative projects, including writing, directing, acting, playing music and performing comedy. Claire Foy, whom Sharpe directed in the 2021 biopic “The Electrical Life of Louis Wain,” described him in an interview with The New York Times as “a Renaissance man” — “a kind one.”American audiences, though, know Sharpe best from his chameleonic run of recent acting gigs: the stoic tech hunk in Season 2 of HBO’s “The White Lotus”; the earnest tour guide in Jesse Eisenberg’s Oscar-winning movie “A Real Pain”; and now, as Felix, the enigmatic indie musician in the rom-com “Too Much,” Lena Dunham’s new Netflix series arriving on July 10.Will Sharpe and Megan Stalter in “Too Much,” a new show by Lena Dunham for Netflix.NetflixWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More