Travel Blog

I have mixed feelings about the cancellation of “The Late Show” because I have mixed feelings about Stephen Colbert.

Colbert is one of my favorite people on television: smart, funny, decent, openly religious in a fiercely secular industry – he is a welcome correction to the idea that nice guys finish last.

But I’m not a fan of him as a host of “The Late Show.” I had hoped that, because of his intelligence and thoughtfulness, he would become the Dick Cavett de nos jours – leading lively discussions with prominent people in the culture – but instead he has kept the one-on-one format of celebrity chit-chat, raising the level from time to time, but also coming across as less amusing (to me at least) than his predecessor David Letterman. His monologues became overwrought attacks on Trump that I rarely laughed at (even though I agreed with them).

Of course, I don’t like the whiff of censorship that clings to CBS’s decision to cancel the show, despite the fact that, according to yesterday’s New York Times, it is “racking up losses of tens of millions of dollars a year.” And I realize that, had Colbert taken the show in the direction I would have liked, those losses would be even greater.

In a strange way, his situation reminds me of mine at the Sun-Sentinel 17 years ago. (Though I had a day to pack up and Colbert’s been given 10 months.) I was the first specialty section editor at the paper, and one of the first travel editors in the country, to be shown the door. And I was let go for financial reasons – the Sun-Sentinel, like most newspapers in 2008, was not losing money, but not making nearly as much as it had been – that were tied, I suspect, to ideological ones: My practice of favoring stories over tips – prioritizing reading over bargain-hunting – did not make me popular with management.

Entertainment industry experts say that the cancellation of “The Late Show” does not bode well for “The Tonight Show” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”, which makes sense; most newspapers no longer have travel editors – or editors of food, fashion, and home & garden. It is very likely that Stephen Colbert will become like me: a harbinger of extinction.

My hope is that another network, or more likely a streaming service, will hire Colbert and provide him with a format in which he can showcase his humor and his intellectual curiosity. Given a real, substantive talk show, he would be a more nuanced, less abrasive Bill Maher.