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.
I haven’t been getting out much, which means I’ve spent a lot of time in front of the TV. Of the four major tennis championships, Wimbledon is the most aesthetically pleasing to watch – players in white running atop perfectly manicured grass – as well as being the most prestigious. At least that’s what the players – Novak Djokovic, Taylor Fritz – have said in interviews.
But early yesterday afternoon, I could find it nowhere on my television. Carlos Alcaraz, one of the most brilliant shotmakers in the history of the game, was playing Andrey Rublev – I knew from checking the scores on my phone – and Nicolas Jarry was battling Cam Norrie, the last British man still in the tournament. Two matches that, you would think, were worthy of coverage. There was also a women’s match – possibly two – going on at the same time. But the two networks with rights to the tournament, ABC and ESPN, were showing, respectively, an old Jack Hanna show about animals and a cornhole tournament. On a Sunday afternoon. ABC eventually broadcast the tennis, at 3 pm, but for a brief time – actually, for tennis fans, not so brief – ESPN gave cornhole precedence over Wimbledon.
I’m in week two of my cold and appreciative that the weather, thanks to Saharan dust, is as meh as I feel. Napping, reading, and watching TV – in addition to sports (tennis, soccer, baseball), quality shows that nobody talks about. We finished the British series Trying, about a couple who, unable to have children, look into adoption, and now the Danish series Chaos, about a couple who are co-hosts of a morning talk show and, off camera, are divided on the subject of children. (He wants them, she’s not sure.) Despite the common theme of family, the shows have almost nothing in common: the British series is funny, the Danish one is much more of a drama; the first is all about home life, the second mainly about professional life. But they’re both about the everyday life of normal people, their relationships with their friends and parents and co-workers, the sort of thing that, when done well, has no need of a murder.
I’m enjoying “Outrageous,” the BritBox show about the Mitford sisters, though I suspect the portrayal of Nancy is off the mark. Her comments are bland, with none of the withering wit that made her novels popular and her letters cherished by Evelyn Waugh. The reviewer for The Spectator had the same reaction, and suggested her persona was changed with an eye on ratings. You could get viewers to warm to a Nazi sympathizer (sister Unity), but, the reviewer suggested, they would draw the line at a first-class snob.
My friend Ardy and I were at lunch yesterday talking about all the things one accumulates over a long lifetime, and I mentioned that I have most if not all of the Sun-Sentinel Travel sections from the fall of 1989 to the end of 2007.
“What are you going to do with them?” Ardy asked.
“Give them to the Smithsonian,” I said.
It was a joke, of course, but they are artifacts: sections of ten, sometimes more, pages filled with ads and charts (those odious and instantly erroneous airfare ones) but also lengthy stories and beautiful photos of interesting places around the world. Those times when I am sent digging into one of my Travel section boxes I am astonished anew by the riches the paper provided weekly to its mostly unimpressed readers.
The New Yorker asks readers every week to supply a caption to a cartoon. The Spectator has a more challenging competition that changes every week. A recent one asked readers to rewrite the Hokey Pokey in the style of a famous poet. Winning entries included the Hokey Pokey written by Philip Larkin and the Hokey Pokey written by Emily Dickinson.