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The Late Show was born out of the desperation of CBS executives to poach David Letterman. Johnny Carson had decided to bring his unchallenged reign over late night to an end. The future of the Tonight Show was up between Jay Leno, a hard-working comic, and Letterman, the darling of media types in New York, who had the hip alternative Late Night show.

NBC settled on Leno, who underwent the first of a series of bastings by the chattering classes for upstaging one of their favorite cringe comics, while CBS created the Late Show to lure Letterman. Initially it seemed as if CBS had gotten a good deal. Buoyed by favorable media coverage, Letterman’s ratings soared while Leno struggled, but over the long haul, Leno could do a traditional comedy monologue while Letterman’s wit lay in subverting late night comedy.

NBC bet on comedy, CBS bet on awkward cringe, and comedy won while awkward cringe lost.

What most people wanted from late night was a zippy monologue with lots of easy punch lines to laugh at followed by a smooth interview with a celebrity guest, not a deconstruction of comedy, awkward moments, facial tics and a fascination with random sounds that Letterman brought to his nightly Lake Wobegon from a Manhattan theater fests and to the Oscars.

History repeated itself again when NBC scrambled to replace Letterman on the Late Show with Conan O’Brien, a talented Saturday Night Live writer with no standup skills or ability as a performer. The Late Show with Conan O’Brien was clever, subversive and everything a show aimed at young college grads from New York City should be. But not suited for the big stage.

When NBC tried to replace Leno with Conan, the whole thing blew up all over again.

But just about then late night was about to fundamentally change because comedy had changed. The old liberal but somewhat apolitical formula that had defined late night comedy was one of the casualties of the Iraq War. Jon Stewart took over the Daily Show on Comedy Central from Craig Kilborn, one of a series of ‘not good enough’ hosts that a paranoid Letterman insisted CBS position after him, and transformed it into a megaphone for political activism.

Stewart had been passed over for Late Night because his tiresome neurotic shtick was unfunny, but his passive aggressive leftist readings of the evening news at just the time when the media was frustrated at its seeming impotence against Bush and post 9/11 patriotism took off. The hip deconstructionist comedy of Letterman and Conan became passe overnight. Media types hailed the Daily Show as the epitome of not only comedy, but journalism, for going after Bush.

Comedy Central quickly ordered a series of similar agitprop shows one of which featured Stewart sidekick Stephen Colbert. Time passed and reading news items in a sarcastic voice while making quips about capitalism also became passe. However entertainment industry executives are slow to pivot and so even as audiences abandoned the glut of smug Daily Show clones hosted by former contributors like Samantha Bee, John Oliver and Jordan Klepper, more were being created and canceled, and CBS decided to turn over The Late Show to Colbert.

The Late Show had been a mixed bag under Letterman, but it became a tedious unfunny slog under Colbert, whose speciality wasn’t hosting a late show, but hosting a mock late show. The distinction seemed technical since Letterman and Conan had hosted mock late shows, but they had been professional comedy writers back when comedy was supposed to be funny.

Colbert didn’t understand comedy, he understood Daily Show comedy which meant saying nasty things about the opposition in a sarcastic voice while wearing a serious expression. The limited appeal of that disappeared almost entirely by the time that Obama got a second term. The Late Show lost its audience and the expensive production became a money loser for CBS.

Even as CBS replaced Letterman with Colbert, the GOP had replaced Bush with Trump, a guy with classic insult comic timing, and the passive aggressive political comedy innovated by Colbert’s mentor was making way for more confrontational and abusive exchanges. Comedy was still political, but the passive aggressive tone Stewart had weaponized against Bush to  undermine 9/11 patriotism without directly attacking it was no longer relevant anymore.

Colbert had outlived his trend but secured one of the greatest prizes in comedy as his sinecure. The Late Show though wasn’t everything it was cracked up to be. CBS had invented it to steal Letterman from NBC and with the original host gone, it really had no reason to exist.

By the time the second decade of the century arrived, neither did late night.

The young male audiences that NBC and CBS had tried to reach with Letterman, Conan and then Colbert were gone, flipping through their phones. The old expensive shows had become white elephants good for nothing more than producing YouTube and TikTok clips.

Where NBC used to fight to get Johnny Carson on as many nights as possible, last year, it cut The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon down to four nights. Late Night with Seth Meyers lost its band. The late shows hosted by ex-Saturday Night Live people were bleeding their audience and NBC was making broad cuts that suggested that they had no real future.

The year before, CBS killed The Late Late Show, which it once hoped would become a franchise like Late Night, but which Letterman had insisted be staffed by hosts whose popularity could never upstage him. It seemed inevitable that the Late Show, the last of Letterman’s legacy, would soon follow as CBS unwound everything it had done to bring him on board.

The Late Show was losing $40 million a year. Colbert was earning a Letterman salary to bring in infomercial level ratings in the demo. Gutfeld on FOX routinely beat Colbert. CBS was spending $100 million a year to lose in late night to a cable network. And while the old CBS might have written that off, the new CBS had become a millstone around the neck of its corporate parent.

The Peak TV wars had come and gone, leaving behind winners and losers. Universal and Paramount were always going to be the losers. No matter how many woke Star Trek shows Paramount created, it was never going to be able to take on Netflix and Disney+. Paramount went up for sale and tried to deal with the problem posed by its biggest losers, its ‘news’ business, which it hadn’t yet figured out how to shed, and the remains of late night comedy.

The Late Show’s ad revenues fell from $120 million to $70 million in under a decade. The zombie late night comedy show wasn’t even covering its own budget and digging a deep hole.

Stephen Colbert knew that the Late Show had no future. His former producer had jumped ship for an even more dead end job, trying to run CNN. But no late night host after Johnny Carson has gone gracefully into the static, and Colbert would be no different. The one asset a fired late night show host had was the ability to play the martyr and burn as many bridges as possible.

Letterman had done it. Conan had done it. Colbert was bound to go out with a long whine.

But it didn’t even matter what Colbert did or didn’t do. The media had an appetite for Trump conspiracies and deeply resented the 60 Minutes settlement that CBS reached with Trump. Senate Democrats, paranoid about losing a biased media and a friendly platform, joined in the conspiracy theories that CBS was dumping a dead late night franchise because of Trump.

CNN’s Jake Tapper accused Paramount of ‘bending the knee’ to Trump by canceling an unfunny comedy show no one watched and which was losing $40 million a year. Tapper, like most of the media types, knows better. But the media no longer reports the news and comedy no longer tells jokes. Jon Stewart helped put them in the same business of pushing narratives.

And those narratives are littered with contempt for opponents and fake conspiratorial outrage.

It’s fitting that Colbert ends the high point of his career as a martyr for a fake cause based on a lie. The same movement which pretended that there was no difference between men and women and that the planet was going to be destroyed any day now has decided to pretend that there was no possible reason to cancel a show from a dying medium except partisan politics.

But partisan politics is the only reason Colbert got the job and kept it this long. A 42% decline in revenues for any other entertainment property combined with $40 million annual losses would normally see anyone else out the door. CBS waited as long as it could before pulling the plug.

Now CBS has killed both of its ‘late shows’ and NBC will do it before too long. CBS News and NBC News talent are all too aware of the implications for them. Liberal politics and prestige nostalgia are only going to go so far now that CBS and NBC are just the rump properties of troubled entertainment companies. The Late Show today, CBS Evening News tomorrow.

Colbert would understandably rather be remembered as Trump’s victim, rather than the guy who turned late night comedy into MSNBC, and just as Bush enabled his career, Trump killed it, not by forcing CBS to cancel the Late Show, but by changing the culture and comedy.

Stewart and Colbert helped kill the brand of chatty politically neutral late night comedy only to see their audience abandon them for podcasts and social media. Culture is now so downstream of politics that apolitical comedy has become hard to find. Political comedy used to be politics with punchlines, but the punchlines are getting harder to find as political comedy turns into political narratives with comedy added to boost the delivery of the lies, insults and threats.

An elderly Stewart, who seems more like Biden than the hip young comic he used to be, is still mumbling and screeching away on a rebooted Daily Show while Colbert’s legacy is turning the Late Show into the Late… Late Show. The duo helped kill comedy, now comedy killed them.