Late-night TV is well and truly dead — at the hands of the hosts themselves.
Their weapon? Their own blind rage at half the country.
Hosts like Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert have deluded themselves into thinking that their mandate is to save democracy with one-sided political rants, rather than serving up breezy topical humor to send Americans to their nightly slumber.
On Wednesday night, Kimmel was put on ice by ABC. Local affiliates had said they wouldn’t air “Jimmy Kimmel! Live” because of his vile monologue suggesting Charlie Kirk’s killer was a MAGA true believer.
“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel had said on-air Monday.
But it was his grotesque commentary that was hitting a new low.
His pronouncement was well out of step with what we already knew to be true about the shooter’s affiliation. Yet Kimmel chose to dive into a conspiracy theory to exploit a horrific political assassination.
If the ideologies were reversed, virtuous lefties would have been red in the face, screaming: “That’s disinformation!”
The reality is, this moment of reckoning was self-inflicted — and inevitable. For the last decade, Kimmel and Colbert have decided that viewers don’t need chuckles and interviews with the celeb du jour.
We don’t even need jokes.
Nope, we need to be lectured on politics and told that one side of the country, those who voted Republican, is inherently evil and destructive.
Even as their cultural power dwindled and viewers splintered into more diverse online offerings, Kimmel and Colbert continued with their collective lead foot on the gas pedal.
But network shows don’t rake in the advertising bucks they used to — and, sometimes, the headaches simply aren’t worth the money.
Kimmel, once an affable and irreverent bro comedian, morphed into a bitter and sanctimonious progressive more interested in scoring points against Trump than in serving weary viewers some much needed levity and distraction at the end of a long, hard day.
But it wasn’t ever just about our president. Kimmel’s monologues became a full and unfair demonization of Republicans and anyone else in the growing coalition that voted for Trump for a myriad of reasons.
He mocked people who didn’t want to take the Covid jab, saying they didn’t deserve medical attention. “A vaccinated person having a heart attack, yes, come right in, we’ll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.”
And those viewers were expected to tune in and clap?
Then there’s Colbert, who turned “The Late Show” into the Dem variety hour with scintillating guests like California Rep. Adam Schiff and former Labor Secretary Robert Reich. Losing upwards of a reported $40 million a year, no wonder it was canceled by CBS in July.
Never one to learn, Colbert is living out his remaining months in the “Late Night” chair lobbing f- bombs at the man in the White House.
Are we not entertained, America?
On Wednesday morning, I watched a 1979 clip of legendary “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson talking to Mike Wallace for “60 Minutes.”
Carson, who hosted from 1962 to 1992, said the role of a late-night talk show host was not to “deal in serious issues,” calling that a “real danger.”
“Once you start that, you start to get that self-important feeling that what you say has great import,” he said. “And you know, strangely enough you could use that show as a forum. You could sway people. And I don’t think you should as an entertainer.”
How prescient Carson was.
One can argue about FCC involvement and the complexities of deals with local-affiliate owners like Nexstar.
But the truth is, Kimmel had committed the great sin of an entertainer.
He became too self-important. So enamored with his personal war against Trump that he lost sight of his audience and his purpose.
Kimmel followed his ego instead.
