http://www.weeklystandard.com/stephen-colberts-show-is-failing/article/2002212
The New York Times
has a lengthy report about what's going on at
The Late Show
on CBS since Stephen Colbert took over for David Letterman nearly a year ago. The
Times's
write-up bends over backwards to put a brave face on it, but Colbert's show thus far has been a pretty big failure. ...
the other big mistake CBS made was assuming that the fact Colbert and Jon Stewart generated dedicated following among influential liberals would translate into a mass audience. On Comedy Central, Colbert had an audience of just over a million people a night. On Fox News, Bill O'Reilly—who Colbert was explicitly satirizing—averaged almost three times Colbert's audience. Yet, it seems nearly impossible to imagine a major network rolling the dice on giving a Fox News host a similarly high profile own show, even when their ability to draw eyeballs is demonstrably better....
...
Colbert may yet succeed. While Fallon was well-known before taking over
The Tonight Show
, Kimmel was also a marginal basic cable comedian who slowly built an audience; and he did it with much less fanfare and promotional support than Colbert seems to have received.
Still, it's remarkable that the media establishment is such a liberal echo chamber that they seem mystified by the fact that a guy who forged his career mocking the mores and politics of half the country has yet to become a broadly popular television personality.
During a recent conversation on here, I mentioned that I thought Colbert needed to recapture his liberal POV on his show as a way to help his ratings. My assumption being that his real audience was from liberals and they had expectations of him.
But this argument from the Weekly Standard is very convincing. The network late night show are essentially populist. People who want a good laugh and some fun interviews as they go to bed. And while Colbert is trying to deliver that, he has already turned off a good part of his potential audience. As the author mentioned, Colbert is talented enough to turn it around. But can he before it is too late?