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STEPHEN

IF you read this after 12:35 a.m. ET on Friday, May 22, “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” is now just television history.

In fact, the Columbia Broadcasting System’s effort to come up with an entry for late-night TV is over. It began in the late 1960s, when the network realized that the old movies airing on its owned stations as “The Late Show” couldn’t match the juggernaut that was NBC “The Tonight Show.”

But both Merv Griffin and Pat “Wheel of Fortune” Sajak couldn’t puncture the market. It wasn’t until 1993, after Johnny Carson retired and Jay Leno succeeded him, that CBS went all-in. They brought in the man thought to be Carson’s heir apparent, David Letterman, and installed him in the 11:30 p.m. time slot.

It worked. Letterman and Leno slugged it out for ratings. Letterman was the more television-savvy guy, understanding that the key to late-night success was creating a buzz that had people staying up late so they could talk about it at work the next day.

Stupid Pet Tricks. Stupid Human Tricks. Larry “Bud” Melman. Hello, Delly. The Top 10 List.

Letterman revered Johnny Carson, who ultimately is the man responsible for late-night TV being an institution. He hosted “The Tonight Show” for more than 30 years. Letterman did his variations on Carson’s comedic touches for the show – such bits as Carnac the Magician and the Mighty Carson Art Players. 

So did Leno. But “The Tonight Show” is the New York Yankees of late-night television. It occasionally reaches for topical humor, but its bread-and-butter is the a-list and b-list stars who come on to promote a movie or TV series.

Carson was more into interviewing authors and politicians when he hosted the show from 30 Rockefeller Plaza in New York. When he moved “Tonight” to California in the 1960s, it became much more of an entertainment vehicle.

That was – and is – “Tonight”‘s legacy, and Leno was probably better suited to continue it than Letterman, who had hosted daytime and late-late-night shows on NBC. 

Freed from the “Tonight” constraints, Letterman appealed to a younger audience and his bits were positioned perfectly for the media change from over-the-air to online that mark the early 21st century. How many times have you watched Letterman and his guests as they come up randomly in the reels of your Facebook feed?

After 30 years, Letterman gave up his show, most likely because Stephen Colbert just finished his historic run on “The Colbert Report” and was out there waiting to be plucked.

Colbert gained some of his political sensibilities from working with Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” Those were heightened when Donald Trump – from all indications, diametrically opposite in personality and ethics from Colbert – rose to power in 2016.

Because Colbert and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel are both on legacy networks, something Trump understands, they have been at each other from the beginning of the first term. When Trump regained the White House in the 2024 election, there’s little doubt Colbert and Kimmel were on some sort of hit list.

Trump failed with Kimmel. His sycophants tried to drive Kimmel off the air after he made a less-than-reverent remark about the murder of right-wing provocateur Charlie Kirk. The flap, which included remarks threatening ABC by tame FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, led to Disney suspending Kimmel’s show indefinitely.

Protests forced Disney to back down and Kimmel returned to the air.

But Trump likely succeeded with Colbert. CBS was taken over by Paramount under the aegis of David Ellison, the son of tech billionaire and general asshole Larry Ellison. His company, Skydance, now wants control of Warner Discovery, the parent of CNN, HBO and Warner Bros.

To get that approval, the Ellisons needed to make nice with Donnie Thinskin. And while Skydance claims “The Late Show” loses oodles of money, most people in the industry call BS.

Letterman, in a recent interview, said “I’m just going to go on record as saying: They’re lying. They’re lying weasels.”

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My soft spot for Colbert goes beyond the fact that we share an alma mater and Northwesterners stick up for one another. He’s not only funny, he’s compassionate, animated and seemingly interested in everything.

More important, he, Kimmel, Stewart, Seth Meyers and John Oliver have done something that the other institutions that we counted on did not.

They stood up to Donald Trump.

The legacy news networks can’t say that. Even the cable networks – CNN and MS Now – can’t. Newspapers like The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times can’t say that. Our universities, with few exceptions and including my alma mater, can’t say that.

But these comedians – and you can add Jimmy Fallon, who walks the NBC tightrope as well as he can – have taken the blows of Trump and his henchmen. Because they’re part of the megamedia, the odds are stacked against them.

They moved late-night television from pure entertainment to becoming the way a whole generation learns what’s going on in the world. They’re trusted more than Bari Weiss’ pet anchorman on CBS or the other non-entities on network news. And no one is taking seriously Fox’s late-night mess, Greg Gutfeld, who is to “comedy” as “poison ivy” is to “vegetable.”

Colbert never flinched. Neither has Kimmel, Meyers or Oliver. They’re out there to reflect the anger that has boiled over from the nonsense Trump has perpetrated since January 20, 2025 – and even those four years before the Biden Sanity Interlude.

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One final point: There’s a good chance you won’t see much of the Colbert archive starting now. The other side in this is petty. They control the rights to his material.. They can bury it – and I suspect that’s what they’re going to do.

So I hope you have some old tapes or Colbert files on your computer. That’s how you’ll remember his fantastic 11-year run on CBS – until his next act surfaces. 

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19 – BADA BING

There was nothing on television like “The Sopranos” in 1954.

In fact, there was nothing in the movies like “The Sopranos.”

In further fact, if you were to go back in time with a recording of “The Sopranos” (and some 1954-compatible way of playing it), there’s a chance you’d be arrested in much of the United States.

It was risque to even imply sex and violence, and communities had laws about what constituted obscenity. On TV, married couples had separate beds. There was never any blood coming from a gunshot wound in a Western or crime film. 

And the most scandalous utterance in film, even into the early 1960s, was Rhett Butler’s final statement in “Gone With the Wind”: “Frankly. my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Contrast that with “The Sopranos.” 

Tony Soprano, a New Jersey mob boss, has his office in a strip club called the Bada Bing. He gets his way through beating and killing people. His vocabulary is chockablock with scatological and carnal synonyms. 

Between Clark Gable and James Gandolfini was the Hays Code. It was Hollywood’s self-censorship effort to avoid government getting involved. Up until the late 1960s, it was a strict guide to how a movie and, later, TV show maker could portray elements of real life that make some people uncomfortable.

And there were people who were uncomfortable even with what was being put out. In 1964, because movies were pretty safe places to let kids go by themselves, my parents had no problem allowing me to see “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” It’s a classic (and about the only Kubrick film I actually enjoy, but that’s not important here).

When I told some of the kids in my neighborhood about it, they were scandalized. The local Catholic newspaper had condemned the movie – most likely because George C. Scott’s character starts the movie in bed with a woman who answers his phone.

Efforts to crack the Hays Code finally succeeded in the late 1960s. 

Three years after seeing “Dr. Strangelove,” my 8-year-old brother and I went to the Town Theatre in Glen Cove to see what we thought – because of the advertising – was a comedy. 

When we came out of seeing “Bonnie and Clyde,” both my brother and I were afraid to tell our parents what we had seen, which had culminated with the piercing of the title characters’ bodies with what seemed like hundreds of bullets. (NOTE: Maybe there should have been a spoiler alert there, but that also is something people in 1954 wouldn’t know about.)

My family apparently wasn’t the only one that felt a little misled. And yet, films with more explicit violence and sex were extremely popular amid the turmoil of the era.

So the motion picture industry developed a rating system to replace the Hays Code. It ranged from G, movies that had nothing anyone could reasonably object to, to X, movies with very graphic sex and violence that theaters would not allow under age 17 to see. The X rating, now synonymous with pornography and bloody films, evolved to NC-17.

In 1954, movies were an important component of local television. They filled afternoon slots, weekend slots, late slots.

But because TV is so easily accessible to families, many of the movies that broke through the various taboos were doomed to be either not airable or edited to distraction. 

That’s where cable television came in. Certain premium channels – HBO, Showtime and Starz among them – showed the movies uncut. Then they started developing shows of their own, such as “The Sopranos,” many of them just as compelling as any movie. 

My parents, after a little hesitance because of its depiction of Italian-Americans, came to embrace “The Sopranos.” Although my Dad was always dismissive of anything with “bad language,” both my parents always looked forward to good entertainment. 

That’s the bottom – whether you see it or not – line.

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