Remember the late-night TV wars?

Rivers. Miller. Johnson. Chase. Hall. Sajak. Thicke. Sykes. 

Many tried to walk in Johnny Carson’s shoes. Few succeeded. Some, like Chevy Chase, called it quits after six brutal weeks. Others, like Arsenio Hall, burned brightly before calling it a late-night career.

Still, the format endured for decades with a few lucky souls carving out crowds big enough to keep them employed. 

• Stephen Colbert
• Jon Stewart
• Jimmy Kimmel
• Seth Meyers
• Bill Maher
• John Oliver

Why? They made money, for starters. And, perhaps more importantly, they pushed the “right” ideology in their shows.

Now, as Hollywood continues to contract on several fronts, late-night shows are not as sustainable as in the past.

Colbert found that out the hard way in July. CBS announced Colbert’s “Late Show” gig will end in May of 2026. Even more dramatic? No one is slated to replace him. “The Late Show” will end as Colbert signs off.

The shocking part? Reports said the show was costing CBS roughly $40 million a year. Why would any business take that kind of a fiscal drubbing in the first place?

That came on the heels of “The Tonight Show” shrinking from five nights a week to four, “Late Night with Seth Meyers” losing his house band and several late-nighters losing their gigs.

Period.

Think Samantha Bee, Desus & Mero, Trevor Noah, James Corden and Amber Ruffin.

That, plus news that late-night TV revenues have plunged in recent years (along with their audiences), suggested Jimmy Kimmel’s prediction might come true faster than he anticipated.

Late-night TV has much less than 10 years left. This year proved it.

Kimmel nearly took his own show down. The far-Left host suggested Charlie Kirk’s killer was part of the MAGA movement without evidence or a shred of logic.

ABC/Disney sent him the bench for a week before he returned sans apology. He cried, again, but not for misleading viewers.

The Hollywood Left and the media rallied on Kimmel’s behalf, and he returned to the show to spread more misinformation.

Meanwhile, Fox News’ “Gutfeld” continued to out perform the competition on a smaller budget (and, admittedly, an earlier time schedule). That proves there’s a market for a right-leaning audiences ignored, or insulted, by the current late-night landscape.

The future doesn’t look bright for the late-night survivors. Kimmel’s contract ends in May, but he’ll likely sign a new deal before then. ABC proved it couldn’t force Kimmel to apologize for spewing misinformation, and Hollywood would rise up, en masse, anew if ABC/Disney let Kimmel walk.

Does it matter if “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” might be losing money a la Colbert? It’s clear money isn’t the deciding factor anymore given what CBS endured for far too long.

It doesn’t ultimately matter. The late-night talkers showed their cards in 2025. They’re all parts of the DNC at this point, sometimes literally.

Let’s not forget both Kimmel and Colbert literally hosted fundraisers for President Joe Biden last year, throwing away their objectivity and ignoring the leader’s obvious cognitive decline.

The last 12 months have shown, even to casual pop culture observers, that the late-night format is political to the bone. The laughs come second to the lectures.

Sometimes a distant second.

Colbert and Kimmel doubled down on their anti-GOP bias. Meyers remains a doggedly political force, and that was before President Trump’s crude call for NBC to yank him and his TDS showcase.

Oliver continues to push progressive talking points from his HBO perch. Jimmy Fallon keeps peddling a lite version of Resistance Comedy to a dwindling audience. The only exception? The night Fallon invited Greg Gutfeld on his NBC showcase.

The only real change has been via “Real Time with Bill Maher.” The HBO talk show offers a more fair and balanced take on liberal satire, although it hasn’t dramatically increased the show’s ratings. (His reach did expand in 2023 when CNN began rebroadcasting his HBO show).

More consumers get late-night style content from podcasts and YouTube-based shows in the 2020s. Think “The Tim Dillon Show,” “The Boyscast” with Ryan Long and Danny Polishchuk and Andrew Schulz’s “Flagrant.”

That is the future of late-night-style programming. Kimmel and co. will soon be its past.

The post 2025: The Year Late-Night TV Collapsed appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

The death of Tom Stoppard impacted far more than just the stage, although his theatrical work was enough to forge a considerable legacy.

The celebrated playwright behind “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Arcadia” and “Travesties” won an Oscar for co-writing 1998’s “Shakespeare in Love.” He also helped Steven Spielberg polish scripts for “Schindler’s List” and the “Indiana Jones” franchise, among others. 

He even shaped a critical sequence in “Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith,” the best of the saga’s prequel films.

Stoppard’s voluminous work stretched to TV and radio, but his ability to withstand an early Cancel Culture blow and, later, defend free speech shouldn’t be forgotten.

Sir Tom’s support for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s caused a kerfuffle in artistic circles. Stoppard later said he wasn’t “canceled” in a modern sense, but his political leanings didn’t help his career.

In some circles, they held him back.

In a recently released biography of Stoppard, the biographer Hermione Lee recounts how the former artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre, seen as the home of radical drama, defined its “ethos and policy [as] never put on a play by Tom Stoppard.”

For years, his politics leaned to the Right, but he didn’t see himself as an activist. Nor did he take sides in his work, preferring to pen different arguments to see who brought the better ideas to the table.

Stoppard admitted to embracing elements of socialism in his later years, either a product of genuine reflection or an attempt to stave off the artistic Left.

Given his bold attacks on woke culture, it’s likely the former.

The five-time Tony winner spent his later years praising Great Britain and free speech. He spoke out against the rise of woke restriction, defended J.K. Rowling from her extreme cancellation and regretted the rise of the term “hate speech.”

In 2021, during the height of the woke movement, Stoppard said Cancel Culture “erodes free speech.” Two years later, he addressed the woke mindset anew, including the need for so-called “trigger warnings.”

“People are now deemed to be much more needful of protection from any kind of a rebuke, reproach, criticism,” he says. “There’s a great sensitivity about how you can talk about anything which might obscurely offend part of the readership.”

He also wanted his fellow artists to express themselves sans restrictions.

“When I hear somebody say something which I think is wrong, the last thing on my mind is that, ‘This shouldn’t be allowed, nobody should be allowed to write this’. I just think, ‘He’s wrong, and I hope somebody is telling him’,” he says, and adds: “The way I was brought up was that you can say anything you like, and then anybody can tell you are talking nonsense, and to speak better.”

Credit common sense, an artist’s mindset or the memories of youth. Stoppard grew up in Czechoslovakia, but his family fled the country during World War II following Germany’s invasion.

The post How Tom Stoppard Stared Down Cancel Culture appeared first on Hollywood in Toto.

Rand shows how altruism is actively opposed to capitalism

The post Now Online: ‘Requiem for Man’ appeared first on New Ideal - Reason | Individualism | Capitalism.

 

"You may have heard a lot of stories about austerity. Consider that both the government and the opposition may want to convey the impression that it has happened, despite it very much not having happened.

"Throughout the 2010s (barring #eqnz), per capita real operating expenditure net of interest expenses ranged from $17,143 to $18,653 - with 2019's jump to $18,653 being well out of line with the prior track. Labour substantially increased spending under its wellbeing focus ...

"Per capita real operating expenditure net of finance cost has been above $21,000 since then; the provisional figure for 2025 is $21,648. ...

"The largest-spend category here by far is social protection [sic]: benefits and superannuation. ...

"Any giant shedding of government staff will show up in General Public Services. The austerity really stands out in this picture. Can't you see it too? ..."

 

~ Eric Crampton from his post 'The state of the books'