July 22, 2025, 10:51am

The Writers Guild of America issued a strongly worded statement Friday about Colbert’s cancellation.

Given Paramount’s recent capitulation to President Trump in the CBS News lawsuit, the Writers Guild of America has significant concerns that The Late Show’s cancellation is a bribe, sacrificing free speech to curry favor with the Trump Administration as the company looks for merger approval.

The statement cites a generally hostile media environment, noting the president’s ongoing lawsuits against CBS and ABC, his regular threats to anyone who portrays him in unflattering light, and the administration’s “unconscionable defunding of PBS and NPR.”

The WGA also refers to the parent-company-in-questions’ uniquely mangy dog in this fight. The “merger” alluded to to is an in-progress acquisition, as Paramount tries to sell itself to the behemoth Skydance.

This week, the guild has called on New York State attorney general Letitia James to join California in a thorough investigation into what went down with Late Night, with an eye to “potential wrongdoing.” The California State Senate launched their own investigation in May, after Paramount offered the Trump administration a $16 million settlement. Which was of course the straw that started the joke that may have scared the camel now trampling Mr. Colbert and his staff.

So, what’s next? Investigations will proceed on both coasts. And culture writers will continue to unpack the writing on the wall re: the end of late night TV. Amidst all the obvious and shady repercussions re: free press, the latter at least makes for an interesting thought exercise.

While it’s easy to feel a general nostalgia for the times when everyone gathered around the boob tube at a certain o’clock to soft-chide and soft-chuckle at the people in power, it’s useful to think about what exactly we’ll miss from the form, should Colbert’s ousting prove a bellwether.

In The New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham praised Late Night as a last remnant of the monoculture. Colbert’s “an institution so basic to the texture of our rapidly thinning common entertainment culture that it feels like a quasi-public utility,” he claimed, in a general observance for the format.

If you take the last season of Hacks for inside baseball, the late night medium and its makers seem pretty self-aware about their predicament, their possibly numbered days. Deborah Vance asked herself this what-will-I-miss question and turned up—spoiler alert!—”not enough.” When forced to choose between her individual integrity and her regular audience plus strings from an evil parent company, one comic (avatar) chose to blow it all up. And I wasn’t the only one to cheer when she did.

I find it curious that these announcements, with—in both Colbert and Vance’s cases—their patinas of moral clarity, affect us precisely because they fulfill the promise of inherently para-social relationships.

Cunningham notes the “odd dual circumstances” that engendered Colbert’s whole persona, as the subversive prankster uncle that America could trust. “Having both the constraints of a boss and the freedom of frequent live broadcasting,” is what allowed him to speak in that between-you-me-and-the-lamppost register. The same register that made all the living rooms trust him was the same register that got him in trouble with the baddies.

And the dailiness of his report—like Jon Stewart’s, or Deborah Vance’s—facilitated the cheeky tone. It’s the news, yes, but it can’t be taken too seriously. Because I’m your pal, not the president. And because there’ll always be more fodder tomorrow.

In a time of TikTok and YouTube ascendancy, all the news that’s fit to print is getting shorter, and a lot less or a lot more serious. (And no one’s really printing it, anyway.) You’re not obliged to a monoculture when we can all sit in a living room, replicating family feeling while staring at separate personal screens. So maybe we don’t need a prankster uncle as we once did.

But at their best, those uncles did speak in a uniquely subversive register. And crucially, they spoke to the whole family. Not to sound like a hey-you-kids-get-off-my-lawner, but like Stewart or Letterman or Carson before him, the Colbert of network TV had my Dad’s ear. My grandma’s. And if you wanted him to be higher or lower brow, more or less political, stronger on X,Y, or Z, that was its own conversation starter at family gatherings or in the workplace. And a useful one, for a coalition as loose as the liberals.

A late night host exists to be projected upon and argued with. Because he is ephemeral and unserious, he makes it feel safe to (even gently!) mock those in power. But perhaps it’s not anymore, in this country.

In any case, I predict Mr. Colbert will leave a (soft) power vacuum when he goes.