>>9373536674.5 million people watched 60 Minutes on CBS this week.
Colbert got almost 4x fewer people to watch his "comedy" A-List Celebrity interview music entertainment variety show.
Your narrative was ALWAYS going to be that "this platform was doomed to fail." Whether it was or wasn't is irrelevant to the real question: Does hacking off half your audience for political low hanging fruit, cheap and lazy comedy, endlessly leaning on that one crutch for ideological reasons help or hurt??
Consider if instead of spending 10 years lobbing softballs at Donald Trump like a gayer, less insightful, less fair Jon Stewart -- what if Colbert had really put in the work and tried to be funny or to innovate. What if he had leaned into Youtube creators? What if he had started doing interviews that felt more natural and conversational like Craig Ferguson? What if he had brought on actually subversive comedians like Shane Gillis? What if he had started doing giant Mr Beast stunts WITH Mr. Beast. What if he had parodied the left just as hard as he parodied the right? What if he had done a million things that I couldn't even imagine because he brings on a staff of incredible creative people and tells them "We have to find a new way of doing this that will work in 2025."
There's a million ways they could've done that show. Making the most generic [insert Late Show] you could imagine into a Two Minutes of Hate against Donald Trump was a short-sighted disaster caused by comedic laziness and holier-than-thou, out of touch, elitist narcissism.