Following Jimmy Kimmel’s lead, NBC will air a rerun of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on May 21 when The Late Show With Stephen Colbert broadcasts its final episode, according to Variety. With no new competition, The Late Show, which CBS cancelled after nearly 11 years on the air, stands to be the late-night leader for a final time.
Since September 2015, when Colbert took over The Late Show from David Letterman, Fallon and Colbert have been crosstown rivals, both broadcasting late-night talk shows from New York City in the same time slot. Kimmel, who has hosted Jimmy Kimmel Live! for more than a decade longer than Fallon and Colbert, provided competition from Los Angeles. Colbert set himself apart, though, with incisive and brainy political humour, which often propelled him ahead of the others in terms of ratings. That was a difficult feat in the era of attentions divided by cell phone screens.
But when CBS announced it was cancelling The Late Show last year, it called the move “purely a financial decision.” That explanation seemed questionable since it came on the heels of CBS/Paramount chief David Ellison settling a lawsuit with President Donald Trump, whom Colbert has often criticised, and the announcement preceded news of the government approving CBS’ merger with Skydance. “Stephen isn’t expensive; he’s a threat,” commented The Daily Show co-creator Lizz Winstead in a Rolling Stone op-ed at the time of the announcement. “[He’s] a wildly popular, truth-telling comic with moral clarity [who] is dangerous in this moment.”
When Kimmel appeared on The Late Show on Monday, alongside Fallon and fellow talk-show hosts Seth Meyers and John Oliver, he voiced support for Colbert and spoke out against Paramount. Reflecting on the outrage that followed his own suspension from ABC for comments about Charlie Kirk, he questioned viewers’ selective indignation. “I will tell you, when I got knocked off the air for a few days, people cancelled [the ABC-affiliated] Disney+,” he said, according to Variety. “Why aren’t people cancelling Paramount+? Because you never had it in the first place?”
From Rolling Stone US
