Josh Gondelman: Yeah, I think to me that is something that is so important to underscore here is that there was, like you said, no pretense other than the FCC commissioner saying, “I don’t like what this TV network is doing, and they better shape up in accordance with my wishes.” And then by extension, the wishes of the president and the whole administration. And so it did feel very much like the government interfering in private speech in a way that is unconstitutional.
Greg Iwinski: Also, I think two feels like a pattern. So the second show people go, “Huh.” And it is popular as much as people say late night is dead, they’re wrong, and that’s just not actually true.
Josh Gondelman: Can you say a little more about that, Greg? Because I think you speak really persuasively about this topic.
Greg Iwinski: Yeah. If by persuasive view mean I text all of you all the time, anytime it ever comes up, but yes-
Josh Gondelman: Persuasively and extensively.
Greg Iwinski: Yeah, there’s this idea that late night is dead, but late night is watched by an incredible breadth of people. I think about my sister, who’s not political at all. Kimmel goes away and she goes, “Oh, he’s funny.” There’s no, “He’s right. He’s left. Oh, he’s funny. Why would a funny guy go away?” And it becomes this obvious thing because it was either AP or Pew, I’m sorry, I remember, but last week had a poll out.
They asked Americans, have you in the last year watched an episode of late night television? Not a clip online, an episode of late night TV? 130 million Americans have watched an episode of Late Night TV in the last year. Half of all US adults have watched an episode of Late Night TV in a year. If 10% of those are watching it every day, that’s a huge number, and then 60% of Americans have watched clips regularly.
Again, we’ve talked about this a lot, and it needs to be discussed in a bigger way, which is saying only two and a half, only two and a half is wild too as somebody who’s made shows that people didn’t watch. Only two and a half million people a night watch this 250 times a year, I guess it’s not popular, I guess late night is dead. Well, there’s a lot of places I could go that if I guaranteed you two and a half million people 250 times a year, that’s incredibly valuable advertising space.
So people are watching it on TV, they’re also watching it on YouTube, which the networks have decided is where our shows should be given away for free. No one here on this call, no one writing a show, no showrunner has said, “Why don’t you give away our whole show for free like you do with Game of Thrones?” Oh, wait, you don’t give away Game of Thrones for free or like NFL. Wait, no, don’t give NFL Football. You don’t give those Amazon games away for free on streaming either.
Like, “Oh, sorry, that new Mark Ruffalo thing that I’m going to watch, he has a hot beard.” Whatever that show is, that’s not giving away for free. You put those where people pay money for them, they have value. You’ve taken our shows, put them somewhere that they’re free, and then said they don’t make money. So those numbers are somehow thrown out the window, even though for most shows, that’s 5 to 6 to 7 million people a night every night.
So now we’re at 7, 8, 9 million people combined. Then you add the clips online, everything else. So people are watching both in any way that we can measure it. Millions, tens of millions of Americans are watching late night TV and in the industry there becomes this conversation about, “Well, late night is dead, late night is dead.” Because I don’t know, it’s not something that you watch if you’re a reviewer for the APV Club.
I don’t know what social disconnect there is, but it’s being watched and it has value. And I think this Kimmel thing is a big example of this backlash doesn’t happen if no one watches the show. And I think to Kimmel’s Point, although he’s gotten more political, Kimmel also made The Man Show. He’s got friends across the board, and to a lot of people, he’s just comedy. Colbert is what? And I love Stephen, I’ve worked there, a lot of us have worked with him, but pretty openly political, but with Kimmel, it becomes a like, “Wait, what?”
Josh Gondelman: Yeah.
Greg Iwinski: I’m sorry, President AOC is going to take Tim Allen’s show off the air. What is next?
Josh Gondelman: These are such great points, and you brought up Colbert, Stephen Colbert, The Late Show. Not only was it announced that Stephen would no longer be hosting The Late show after next May, but that the show would be going away in its entirety, no new host. And they at one point said they were losing all this money making the show. And Liz, you and I have talked a little about this off mic, about what felt kind of fishy about that rationale post facto rationale, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that.
Liz Hynes: I would love to talk about that. As far as I can remember, that leak happened at least 24 hours after the initial backlash. So it gets announced that The Late show is being retired permanently. There is enormous blowback, and then it’s like, “Well, they were actually losing all this money.” A television show is not a company auditioning to do an IPO.
You can tell that since I used the word audition, I didn’t go to business school, but I know enough to know that we do not measure the success of a television show by this. We’re in the red or we’re in the black.” It’s ratings, it’s award shows. That’s what they talk about at shareholder meetings, that’s what they talk about for your consideration campaigns. We have metrics for this, and much like Greg has talked about how they’re redrawing the lines on where the audience is.
If you want to make the argument that late night is dying, you can say that terrestrial viewership is down, but that is true almost across the board for every kind of genre, the audience has moved. Similarly, you can just draw lines kind of wherever you want, if you want to say that, “Oh, well, this show specifically is losing all this money.” CBS has three CEOs, do we need to have three CEOs? None of whom can figure out how to monetize the number one late night show in television, that feels like maybe there’s some cost-cutting opportunities there, but that’s not an acceptable place to cut, that’s not where they want you to think the line gets drawn.
So I just think everyone should always know that the numbers you’re hearing from corporate are numbers that they massage, if not outright makeup, but it was nebulous enough to kind of poison the well and plant the seeds of doubt for people to be like, “Well, maybe I don’t totally understand what happened at Colbert, but that $40 million is a lot of money.” They did get away with this. And so then with Kimmel, they don’t need to bother with the pretense. So I think that it had to fall in that way so they could make it easier to say, “Who did Trump tweet that he wanted to be next?” That’s who will go next. And we don’t have to make up a reason why.
Josh Gondelman: It was so direct with Stephen. There was him saying on air that CBS News paying a settlement to Trump while the Paramount, Skydance merger was in progress felt like a bribe to make that merger go through more smoothly. And then Colbert was canceled, but remained on the air, of course, for several more months. And then there was this post facto justification that it was losing money. With Kimmel, it was Brendan Carr goes on a right wing podcast, says, “Wouldn’t it be nice if this happened?”
This happens, and Kimmel is off the air that night. And so I do think, right, it felt like they’d accelerated the timeline and the brazenness of how directly this is the government saying, “This is speech we don’t like, and it would be great if it disappeared.” How are you all feeling about the landscape of late night now given these free speech battles that late night has become the terrain for, and how do you feel about the future of the industry?
Liz Hynes: Do you remember back in, let’s say maybe 2017, 2018, the first Trump administration? I think late night, got put on this pedestal that was not entirely earned. And it was a lot of people saying the famous phrase, “You’re keeping us sane.” And these hosts would go out and they would meet people and everyone would tell the host, “You keep me sane. I put you on every night.” And, “You’re saving democracy.”
I do not, and have never thought that that was true at the time. I think maybe some of that is being a little bit retroactively earned. I think it is a legitimate battleground for freedom of speech now. I think criticizing the president has become legitimately dangerous, criticizing US foreign policy we’ve seen people get kidnapped off the street for writing an op-ed, criticizing US foreign policy. There are documented instances now of people being detained for speech, photographer at an ice protest has been detained for over a hundred days at risk of deportation.
And at the same time, Marco Rubio keeps trying and so far failing to introduce the ability to strip people of their passports, citizen or not in response to speech, in response to their very broad definition of terrorism, knee-jerk, scary word. You brought in the definition, anyone who criticizes you as a terrorist, anyone who’s an anti-fascist, anyone who’s an anti-capitalist. If you see the latest national security directive that came out, a lot of people on this call have written things that would fit under that very, very increasingly large umbrella of punishable speech.
So I think you can’t be like, “Oh, but the people getting arrested aren’t citizens.” You should care anyway. But it is so clearly every domino is set up for it to start to apply to citizens, to people who have born and lived here our entire lives, that shouldn’t matter that much. It should be a crisis no matter who it’s happening to. But I do think that people who are regularly, publicly and loudly criticizing the president is legitimately dangerous in a way it wasn’t in 2017.
Sasha Stewart: Something that bums me out is something that we’re seeing across the board in this entire industry industry-wide contraction, which is that as what is happening in feature films and in scripted TV is also happening in late night, which is that when there’s a contraction, we’ve seen this time and time again. The first people who get hit are people of color and women.
And so what we saw in 2017, partially in response to the first Trump administration, when companies found it profitable to fight back and because this was also during the streaming boom, and so more shows were getting made, we saw a lot of late night, really fabulous late night shows being helmed by women and people of color and women of color. And then as this contraction began, so this is before the second Trump administration, I want to say this actually started in about 2022 with the Warner Brothers, Discovery merger.
We saw Samantha Bee get canceled. We saw a Ziwe get canceled. Then we saw Desus & Mero get canceled. We saw all of these really wonderful shows get canceled due to budgetary constraints that were because of things that were wildly outside of the control of the people who actually work in this industry. And the hope that I have is that because this is a cycle, it means it will end, and that in a few years, we will start to get to see hosts of color and women hosts and women of color hosts back on the air and doing what they do best. And how will that look in a few years? Who knows? Who knows where those shows will be or how people will watch them, but I believe they will continue to exist in some form or other, and I hope that we all get to write on them.
Greg Iwinski: Or host them. I will say I am always optimistic about late night, even when that is a minority opinion. I think there’s a pendulum swing back and because I think Liz is, as I say many times with many things, Liz is 100% right. Trump winning broke Sorkin era, liberal white boomers, it crushed everything they thought about what America was and they could not psychically handle it, and they needed other boomers to go on TV and be like, “It’s okay. We are still the good guys. This is a mistake. We’re going to figure it out. There’s going to be one good speech that’s his face gives in a church and it’s going to fix everything like the West Wing.”
And so that pushed late night up both budget and in attention and in value and importance. It went from a 12:30 mindset. If you’re our age growing up of weird Conan stuff that no one’s watching to 11:30, which is like this is so important to really a 10:30 PM. mindset in late night, which was like, “Instead of the news, I don’t watch this after the news. I watch it instead of the news and it’s so important.” And this is me fighting back, me tuning in is resistance and one that didn’t work because he won again after doing a coup. But also, that can’t be almost 10 years later counter-cultural.
If only because all the people making it and watching it are 10 years older. And so I do think we’re going to swing back. I think, one, we need to swing back towards 12:30, which is we’re weird idiots doing a thing you can’t believe they’re letting us do, which also takes a network willing to do that, but I think that there’s a distinct millennial sensibility that’s not in late night right now that needs to be there, which is we are so incredulous. We’re in high school when 9/11 happened or younger. So the idea that the system is broken is not only something we already know, we’re not interested in wasting time setting it up.
All of us have done very long essay political news pieces that have jokes in them. And most of the first act that a boomer would write you could throw out. Did you know that the police have some issues? Historically, they’ve been pretty bad to black people. Yes, we can skip that. I can start a script with, “You know a lot of cops are pretty bad, right?” Okay, good. Let’s go. And we need to be able, from everything from this shutdown fight to should the Dems swing left or to how do we talk about each other aligned to political violence?
We can skip an incredible amount of preamble conversation when Mike Johnson is going on TV being like, “I didn’t hear what the president said.” We can just say, “He’s lying. He doesn’t want to talk about it.” All this anxiety and agita and stress that’s in late night right now of forcing the audience to go, “Can you believe the hypocrisy? “I think there’s a moment where it breaks and with newer, younger voices that are now reaching hosts, level of experience will come a relief of being like, “We all get it’s bad. Now that we’ve all admitted it’s bad, now we can make a comedy show.”
So I’m optimistic because I think it’s going to swing back. Cheaper, weirder, darker, more punk rock, whatever. But I think it swings back to a place that speaks to this moment more. And I love all the hosts who are on TV now, but all the 11:30 hosts got their seats before Trump won the first time. So there’s never been a seat that big that’s been filled to address this moment, and I think that’s something that has to happen.
Josh Gondelman: So I think we have been talking a lot about this from the intersection of our job as writers and our positions as late night writers and former late night writers in intersection with free speech and government. And I think I would like to think about this a little more expansively thinking of ourselves as not just writers, but workers, right?
This is a Writers Guild of America East Podcast, so thinking of ourselves as labor and not just as consumers or people who drive culture and thinking of ourselves as citizens and if not citizens, residents with a vested interest in the health of the democracy under which we, let’s say allegedly live. So what about the way people are fighting to preserve free speech is exciting and energizing to you? And what are some ways forward as people in this fight?
Sasha Stewart: Something that happened to me when I was working on a project from 2018 through 2020 was that I used to always think of myself as a writer who did her activism through writing. And I do think that as coming up as a late night writer, that is a very natural way for us to feel that the way that I am speaking truth to power is in my job and I don’t really need to do it beyond that. And donating to X, Y, Z organizations once a month, and then when I was working on this project, it was called Amend: The Fight for America.
It’s a six part Netflix series about the 14th amendment, the one the Supreme Court pretends doesn’t exist. I realized that the activists who have made so much change throughout history, specifically in American history, because what this was about were just regular people and that they did their activism not just as part of their jobs, but just as part of their lives, and it didn’t have to necessarily be something that they were amazing at. It didn’t have to be their skill set.
Like, yes, of course Ida B. Wells is an incredible journalist, but she was also part of the founding of the NAACP and left when it wasn’t progressive enough. You know what I mean? She also single-handedly integrated a women’s suffrage parade just because she wanted to, not necessarily as a journalist, but just because she was like, “This is something I care about.” And to me it was like, “Oh, right. I need to get involved outside of being a writer and outside of being a worker and just being a human being who lives in this country and wants to make it a better place.”
And so I started just volunteering, and I have found that in my volunteering work, whether it’s for a campaign or in voter protection or with our union being Secretary of Treasury now, we’ve all been council members. It gives you back so much more than you put in. Yes, the work can sometimes be exhausting, but it makes you feel more engaged. It makes you feel more hopeful and optimistic because you are putting effort into it and you get to see that make real change, and maybe the change is small, maybe the change is huge.
Something that I found so inspiring is the Mamdani campaign. Here in New York, people just decided, “Wait, this potential mayor seems great. What if we actually elected him?” And he’s inspired so many people who’ve never canvassed before to start canvassing, which is a scary thing. Canvassing as a volunteer is like, “That’s the big times. That’s the big league. You’re really doing it. Talking to strangers on the street, New York City, are you kidding?”
But people are doing that because they see that real change might be possible and they’re inspired. And I think that the more that we as writers, like you said, Josh, see ourselves as workers, see ourselves as part of this collective, and that anything that we do can be powerful and meaningful. You can write letters, you can make calls, you can get on the street and protest. The best thing that you can do is literally doing something and then slowly building up from there.
Liz Hynes: I totally agree with that. And I’ve been really inspired by people that we’ve encountered, whether it was on the picket line or most recently rallying for Kimmel, people who before we even-handed them a flyer said, “I’ve already canceled Disney Plus.” This is Insane. Kimmel was during the day, so most people were walking on route to work, but the strike was so long that people would stop at all hours of the day to talk.
People were really curious about why we were out there, how many people write most shows. I thought it was just one person writing everything. And just, I think that especially as we’re served a lot of algorithmic slop content, we are supposed to buy into the idea that this is all inevitable and this is all very passive, and we’re not supposed to fight back against any of it. And every time we are actually out there, even just with what we engage with as a guild, let alone other protests, like Sasha mentioned, there is a real desire to connect.
There’s a real curiosity around art and around how we’re fighting back against fascism, against the reduction of everything into content and AI and everything that people really do want to connect over this. And so I’m always happy after having any conversation in real life with a total stranger who is curious about me and I’m curious about them because that is what we’re supposed to believe is destined to evolve out of humanity, and I disagree.
Greg Iwinski: Beautiful. Honestly, I love America. Black people have a deep pain and frustration with America and this deep, deep love because it’s your home. You didn’t voluntarily immigrate from anywhere. And I love America, and I think what this has shown me, one is that across all the great movements of justice in this country, it has shown that the architecture that the founders built as much as they were all pretty bad dudes in terms of slaves and liking me or that I exist, they built a really great architecture.
And so the idea that freedom of speech is first, and it’s the one you fight against first, and it’s the one that is unassailably important. As we are stress testing the Constitution and our government, I think it holds up very well, and it’s on us to make it stronger and to gird the foundations of it, but I am optimistic and it makes me love this country and being here because I do think at the end of the day, when you look at all these Americans and people and you show them what’s going on outside of an algorithm, outside of agitprop content, outside of all these things designed to break their brains, and you just get them all in the same place, like a picket line, a bar, a basketball game, and you go, “Isn’t this suck? Don’t you want something better?”
They’ll go, “Yeah.” And you go, “Okay, we can go do it.” And so I do think that’s the direction we’re headed. Not that we’ll all agree on everything, but that everyone can agree, or at least two-thirds of us can agree that this is bad and we want to do something different. So I do have hope in that.
Josh Gondelman: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much to all three of our panelists, Greg Iwinski, Sasha Stewart, Liz Hynes for talking to me about late night and free speech on writing podcast. This was really a wonderful conversation. I appreciate your time and your thoughtfulness. So thank you all so much.
Sasha Stewart: Thank you, Josh.
Greg Iwinski: Thank you.
Liz Hynes: Thanks, Josh.
Greg Iwinski: OnWriting is a production of the Writers Guild of America East. The series is produced by WGA East staff members, Jason Gordon, Tiana Timmerberg, and Molly Beer. Production editing and mix by Julia Yort. Original music by Taylor Bradshaw. Artwork is designed by Molly Beer. To learn more about the Writers Guild of America East, visit us online at wgaeast.org or follow the guild on all social media platforms @WGAEast. If you enjoyed what you heard today, please subscribe to the podcast and give us a five star rating. Thanks for listening. Until next time, Write On.
