Thread by @CrownMaybe

As I barely remembered that Stephen Colbert existed until yesterday, I went looking to see what his guest list looked like. I went to 2024 because it was an election year and it was a chance to play both sides for ratings, etc., and I figured I'd see if he was really in the tank.

To look at this properly, I excluded known partisan celebrities and only included them if their work/presentation has been politics-first. This basically excludes almost all athletes and eliminates soft-liberal idiots in Hollywood.

By way of contrast, Barbra Streisand would be included; these days, she's best-known as a largely-retired actress and idiot with political opinions. Bryan Cranston, an idiot lefty if there ever was one, does not make the list because he's best-known as an actor.

This part is inherently subjective, but as I'm giving names and not just numbers, you may make your own evaluation.

So, begin with January 2024. There were a total of 28 guests. (Colbert's monologues were definitely Trump-unhappy, but I'm putting that to the side.) There were two openly political guests (Barbra Streisand and Gayle King). I thought about including Common; YMMV.

February 2024: 23 guests, 4 political (Elizabeth Warren as the sole guest, Joy-Ann Reid as the split, John Oliver solo, Chris Hayes on the split).

You might begin to suspect there's a trend here but, as Olden Demon says, stick with me to the end.

March 2024: 17 guests, 6 political (Bernie Sanders, Neil deGrasse Tyson, John Dickerson, Patton Oswalt, Stephen Breyer, Fareed Zakaria -- I included Oswalt because, c'mon, no one cares about his acting, and didn't include Yuval Harari because edge case).

April 2024: 25 guests, 5 political (Savannah Guthrie, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (kinda an edge case), AOC as a solo, Christiane Amanpour on the split, George Takei on the split, left out Doris Kearns-Goodwin as an edge case).

The trend continues: Just under a fifth to just over a fifth of the guests are various left-wing politicos, media, and activists, ranging from A-listers to "who's that again?" It's basically a long-running DNC ad but better managed.

Jen Psaki. Doug Emhoff. Seth Myers. Anthony Fauci. Jamaal Bowman(!). Adam Kinzinger. Kaitlan Collins. Hillary Clinton. More Bernie Sanders. And on and on and on through the remainder of the year.

I want to stress that this is particularly fine: This is clearly what the nakedly-political Colbert wanted and what his audience wanted. I make no bones about this. Doubtless, advertising executives wanted/tolerated this, too -- to a point.

CBS was basically running a high-production-values MSNBC late night variety show and wanted advertisers to act like it was a Magically Broadly Popular program coming off a banger prime-time lineup in 1987.

Probably the most damning thing about that lineup is how often Colbert had on his literal competition -- Oliver, Meyers, and so on. Yeah yeah, left-wing morons, whatever, but: He had on his competition, filling slots that could have gone to celebrities pushing visual products.

Just to give you an idea how seriously Colbert took his advertisers, here's August -- just after Biden drops out with a severe case of Advanced Age-Related Bidenitis -- and the DNC's month:

September and October are real bangers, BTW.

As I said elsewhere, I gauge as profoundly unlikely that there's some explicit or implicit quid pro quo between Trump and Paramount leading to this -- not because he's insufficiently slimey, but because I doubt he even noticed, and if he did, cared before the next shiny appeared.

The likelier answer is that Paramount -- which isn't exactly doing so hot other than Yellowstone-related products -- almost certainly looked and said, "We may have misgauged the market and also it looks like this guy's determined to keep us there AND he's losing money."

I add one coda: At some point, because of Jon Stewart's continuing degradation of our culture and the seeding of late night with his proteges and imitators, and because of the other factors that have slowly crushed broadcast television, late night has been bleak for a while.