David Letterman<\/a> and Jon Stewart processing 9\/11 with clarity and humanity.<\/p>\n\n\tIt also minted stars: Joan Rivers, Bob Newhart, Robin Williams, George Carlin, Jerry Seinfeld, Letterman himself \u2014 performers simultaneously spotlighted and eclipsing the hosts who booked them. Late night functioned as the industry\u2019s most reliable launchpad and hype machine. It was where studios sent talent to charm the masses, networks introduced new shows, and stand-ups tested material that might lead to sitcom deals. Booking a couch spot wasn\u2019t just a promotional tactic \u2014 it was part of the pipeline.<\/p>\n
\n\tBut at its height, late night was more than just a marketing platform. It was a populist art form, as socially aware as it was silly. \u201cSteve Allen had this incredible ability to do a serious discussion \u2014 whole shows about addiction and organized crime and McCarthyism \u2014 and then jump into a vat of Jell-O,\u201d says Ben Alba, a professor at DePaul Law School and author of Inventing Late Night: Steve Allen and the Original Tonight Show. \u201cIt was a blend we just hadn\u2019t seen before.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tThe idea that late night shows were once apolitical is a myth. But partisanship was seldom their goal and certainly, in a country not yet addicted to outrage, almost never the consequence.<\/p>\n
\n\tFor better or worse, Tonight and its successors also helped invent the viral moment, like Drew Barrymore\u2019s flashing of Letterman in 1995 \u2014 a paradoxical plot turn given the prime role that digital clips have played in the format\u2019s demise.<\/p>\n
\n\tThrough it all, late night has been distinctly American \u2014 ironic but fundamentally optimistic. If things were truly hopeless, could we really all laugh together before bed? According to the Gallup-based \u201cWorld Happiness Report,\u201d Americans in the past half-century were happiest during the mid- to late 1980s \u2014 the height of the Carson-Letterman era. That may be coincidence, but it\u2019s tempting to see it as part of a larger, now-vanished mood. Since the early 2010s \u2014 when social media use exploded \u2014 U.S. happiness levels have steadily declined, along with late night ratings.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.hollywoodreporter.com\/wp-content\/themes\/vip\/pmc-hollywoodreporter-2021\/assets\/public\/lazyload-fallback.gif\")
<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tDavid Letterman hosted Barack Obama there in 2009.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tJohn Paul Filo\/CBS via Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd yet, structurally, little about the genre has changed over the course of the decades. By the time Leno took over the Tonight Show desk in 1992 \u2014 an event that itself now seems prehistoric \u2014 someone had already sat behind it for nearly 40 years making the same sort of jokes and talking to the same sort of people on the same sort of couches. And that someone, by the way, had almost always been a white male. The lack of diversity was troubling then; it\u2019s glaring now.<\/p>\n
\n\tStill, there was reassurance in the routine. \u201cFor five days a week, you produce a show ready to tape at 5:30 \u2026 and know it will get sent out to millions of people and be in their homes and in their ears as sometimes the last thing they hear before they go to bed,\u201d says Hacks co-creator Jen Statsky, a former Tonight Show writer. These institutions mattered, she explains, because they offered immediate takes on the day\u2019s events, \u201csometimes comforting, sometimes offering a new perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tOn HBO Max\u2019s Hacks, Jean Smart plays stand-up comedian Deborah Vance, who after a long and winding road lands the coveted top spot at a late night show.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy of MAX<\/p>\n
\n\tThe genre was so embedded in American life that an urban myth once claimed Johnny Carson\u2019s massively popular show \u2014 often watched from bed \u2014 was responsible for a baby boom. There\u2019s no evidence for that, but the fact that people believed it says something about how deeply Carson and company had burrowed into our routines.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe internet ended that dominance. By the 2010s, clips were more popular than full episodes, and in 2020, NBC moved The Tonight Show and Late Night With Seth Meyers to Peacock primetime \u2014 marking the rise of a late night show that was neither late nor, for many, even a show.<\/p>\n
\n\tColbert still draws around 2 million nightly viewers on CBS \u2014 enough to top the field today, but hardly what Leno or Letterman averaged at their peak, and a fraction of the 11 million who tuned in nightly for Carson. The Jimmys \u2014 Fallon and Kimmel \u2014 pine for that network audience. And while they and their cable cousins \u2014 Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Bill Maher \u2014 can still command audiences on social, the idea of producing a giant celebrity-hosted show just to support the pennies of digital ad revenue (Colbert\u2019s Late Show reportedly loses $40 million a year) and fractured minutes of viewing would get laughed at by the most mediocre MBA.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tJohnny Carson gets a leg up with the help of an elephant and the San Diego Zoo\u2019s Joan Embery. <\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\u00a9NBC\/Courtesy Everett Collection<\/p>\n
\n\tWorse, its cultural function may have vanished. If late night was born of a postwar America thirsting for national unity and the anesthetizing pleasures of its new suburban contentment, the genre\u2019s death may be equally reflective of a moment \u2014 one whose jittery pocket-viewing has little need for expensive production or benign celebrity anecdotes. Not to mention the old social vice. We used to watch late night to wind down from a stressful day at the office. Now the office has entered our homes at night, and we\u2019d rather spend the time getting riled up.<\/p>\n
\n\tTo the extent politics has hastened the end of late night, it\u2019s a cruel irony: The very force that gave the format its urgency in recent years has also contributed to its collapse. And yet that urgency is exactly why some argue it\u2019s worth preserving. \u201cWhen we have an administration suing 60 Minutes or The Washington Post for expressing opinions in opposition to their agenda, it\u2019s a particularly scary time,\u201d says Hacks co-creator Paul W. Downs. \u201cNow more than ever \u2026 it\u2019s important to take care of these institutions.\u201d<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\tFans lined the street in 1965 for a chance to see The Beatles at the Ed Sullivan Theater.<\/p>\n
\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCBS Via Getty Images<\/p>\n
\n\tStill, perhaps its end was always baked in \u2014 not because of some flaw in the format but because the format itself was never truly built. \u201cA lot of what we know about late night from the past 70 years is an accident,\u201d says Alba. \u201cIt\u2019s not like someone said, \u2018Let\u2019s come up with a desk and guests and a monologue.\u2019 They were just things Steve Allen happened to be good at.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tAnd its essential appeal hasn\u2019t gone anywhere. \u201cWe do still want to spend an hour with personalities somewhere,\u201d says Herzog. \u201cThey\u2019re called podcasts. They\u2019re the bastard child of late night and Howard Stern and where we now get our deep dives and daily takes.\u201d<\/p>\n
\n\tWhat we lose is the shared cultural touchstones, the ability to agree on a point of reference, if not a point of view. But media fragmentation and digital tribalism were already facts of life. The demise of late night isn\u2019t what\u2019s dividing us \u2014 it simply reflects how divided we already are.<\/p>\n
\n\tThis story appeared in the Aug. 6 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Google \u201cJohnny Carson gets attacked by an emu.\u201d You won\u2019t be disappointed. Taped back in 1983, it\u2019s far…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":52650,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[49,48,12997,75,22148,3668,6713,348],"class_list":{"0":"post-52649","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-david-letterman","11":"tag-entertainment","12":"tag-late-night","13":"tag-stephen-colbert","14":"tag-the-late-show-with-stephen-colbert","15":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52649","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52649"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52649\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/52650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52649"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52649"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52649"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}