re: Late night talk shows are dead and buried

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If you don’t think the Colbert Report was funny, you literally have no sense of humor…

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The Colbert Report was funny. Not always, but it was legitimately funny.

Late night started dying, honestly, with the whole Leno/Letterman/Conan saga. Leno became seen as an unwatchable a-hole. Letterman was leaving. Conan was hysterical but his humor didn't appeal to everyone.

So networks just aimed for Letterman and Leno-lite.
Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers are "safe". They don't have the absurdly quirky antics of Conan, but lack the charm of someone like Craig Ferguson, who could just charm the pants off of anyone on his show.

Another nail in the coffin is that it used to be the only time you got the skinny on celebrities was on late night; the internet's saturation has made it both easy to learn a billion things about any celebrity as well as learning too much about them. How many celebrities did you enjoy only to learn something about them that made you second guess wanting to learn anything new?

Late night died with the saturation of the internet coupled with a focus on "safe" hosts instead of ones that pushed neither the comedic or charismatic enveople.

Also... it still feels weird to refer to Jimmy Kimmel as the "safe" one for those of us who remember his time on the Man Show.