Paul Shaffer Is As Pessimistic About the Future of Late Night As Everyone Else
The long-time bandleader and sidekick of The Late Show with David Letterman is worried that no other late-night duo will ever again be able to pull off what he and David Letterman did, now that the medium has been ruined by Donald Trump and Jimmy Fallon.
Of course, Paul Shaffer didn’t come out and name those two late-night villains as the culprits of the industry’s downfall, but, like everyone else who once had skin in the talk-show game, Shaffer understands how drastically the business has changed since his heyday, and he doesn’t like what he sees in late night’s future. The 75-year-old Canadian comedy and music great recently attended the Toronto International Film Festival where he spoke to Entertainment Weekly about the CBS cancellation of the Late Show franchise amidst political pressure from the White House, and he also alluded to the way that the internet era has morphed late night as a whole into a segment-filled factory for viral clips that barely resembles the kind of operation that Shaffer and Letterman ran in the 1980s and 1990s.
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Even though Shaffer left late night along with Letterman in 2015, he's kept abreast of the issues that the medium now faces, and he, like us, believes that the end could very well be nigh for the remaining talk shows, whose few bandleaders will never know the run that he had. “Thirty-three years,” said Shaffer of his time on both The Late Show and Late Night with David Letterman. “No one ever got that far. No one did it for as long as we did, 33, and maybe now they won’t. They may not get to.”
On the topic of the decision by Paramount Global and CBS to end the Late Show franchise while they awaited approval by Donald Trump’s FCC on a multi-billion-dollar acquisition deal with Skydance Media, Shaffer says that, considering how Colbert’s take on The Late Show showed strong ratings leading up to the announcement, he found the news “shocking. Absolutely shocking.” Added Shaffer, “That’s all I can say. I mean, I don’t know what more to say about it. Stephen Colbert was absolutely number one.”
Furthermore, Shaffer doesn’t like the outlook for other late-night franchises in a post-Late Show world, saying, “I wouldn’t be surprised if those doom-sayers that are saying it signifies the end of the Late-Show-type-of-thing, you know, late-night television, it’s over.”
Even without political pressure from Trump, Shaffer knows that the medium was already in a tough spot with modern audiences, as he said of late night’s decline, “People will watch clips on their computers, and it all makes sense to me. I’m glad that I was in and out of there while the getting was good.”
After all, when Shaffer and Letterman closed up shop, so did their lead-out late-night partners at The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, which opened the doors for James Corden to come to CBS and show his late-night colleagues what the future of the medium looked like: a gimmick-heavy, attention-grabby and remarkably clickable variety hour that’s best consumed in 60-second bites on Twitter, YouTube or Instagram. Then, when Corden mercifully exited the timeslot in 2023, CBS abandoned the talk-show pretense entirely, attempting to capture a new generation with the doomed internet-focused game show After Midnight.
Now, after failing to synthesize late-night comedy into the TV equivalent of an Instagram Live, CBS is abandoning late night entirely. The only shows that should be safe from any more Paramount meddling are ones like The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, which is closer in both form and comedic value to its own ad breaks than it is to Letterman and Shaffer’s show.
If clip-based late night is going to be all that’s left, maybe the entire medium should retire.
