After ‘The Late Show’s Cancellation, Late-Night Writers Vow to Bring the Fight to the Trump Administration
We’ve had nearly two weeks to get used to the idea of Stephen Colbert and The Late Show leaving the airwaves next year. And yet, getting used to it seems to be the last thing anyone plans to do. Comedians are planning to make even more jokes about Donald Trump. Jimmy Kimmel is clapping back at Donald Trump’s gloating about Colbert and threats against Kimmel’s show. Poll respondents believe The Late Show was cancelled for political reasons, and don’t approve. And staffers from inside the late-night world are more determined than ever to keep up the attacks on the administration.For Vanity Fair, Laura Bradley spoke with Liz Hynes, a Writers Guild of America East council member with knowledge of the genre: She was an executive assistant and writers’ assistant at The Late Show With Stephen Colbert who went on to write on Last Week Tonight With John Oliver from 2020 through 2023. She questioned the received wisdom that late-night shows are waning, pointing out that CBS could boost viewership of The Late Show by dropping episodes on Paramount+ at the same time they’re airing on the network (which HBO does). Hynes is also surprised that the official statement about The Late Show’s cancellation cited “financial reasons,” since a late-night show’s success is typically measured by its ratings, not its revenue. Besides which, “What kind of negotiation is just handing down a sentence to a show without giving them an opportunity to trim costs?” Hynes wondered. This brought Hynes, and a second unnamed source Bradley identifies as “another late-night insider who requested anonymity for fear of becoming a target of the administration,” to the rumored $40 million an anonymous source claims The Late Show has been losing each year. Even Colbert has repeated the number to dispute it; Hynes and the insider are dubious about it too. When Bradley tried to confirm it for the VF piece, even CBS hedged, and “directed VF back to the statement the network released when announcing The Late Show’s cancellation.” If CBS still won’t go on the record about the figure, how seriously should the rest of us take it?Regardless, the imminent loss of what Hynes estimates is around 200 jobs at The Late Show has galvanized writers against attacks by Trump, his administration and the corporate interests that would collaborate with them. Or as Hynes says, “This administration and their donors and the companies that have capitulated to them have done nothing to earn public trust. … I just think when something like this happens that looks so bad, it is important to have a reaction.”Now that Trump seems emboldened to make threats against other shows and artists that criticize him, it’s even more important not to surrender. “As long as you keep giving in, they will keep taking,” says the anonymous insider. “We have to go down fighting.” They also call the WGA “a fighting union” and draw a line from the solidarity shown during the 2023 strike to the current moment: “We fought in the strike and won.… We will keep fighting, because it’s not just for us.”
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