'The Late Show' bows out, and weekly numbers for May 11-17

I’m putting together this newsletter while watching the final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, partly because I had family stuff earlier in the evening and partly because I wanted to say at least a little something about it before the next newsletter over the weekend. (And that’s why it’s reaching your inbox on Friday morning instead of Thursday evening.)

As I wrote in Monday’s newsletter, Colbert was done dirty by CBS and Paramount. Even if The Late Show was losing money (though a lot of people are skeptical it was as big a money sink as CBS claimed), that seems at least partly like a skill issue from his bosses. The final season, and particularly this past couple weeks as Colbert has had favorite guests and friends return, plus a wonderful episode with David Letterman, has been really, really good.

I had a couple paragraphs written about how I was glad this was a mostly normal episode, and then the wormhole porton of the show — clearly filmed earlier this week, when Jon Stewart and Colbert’s Strike Force Five buds were on the show — forced a rewrite. And why the hell not end on a weird note? Why not go out with Colbert entering into an alternate-dimension, jazzy singalong of a very old Elvis Costello demo (“Jump Up”) with Costello himself and his current and former bandleaders, Louis Cato and Jon Batiste?

… Who then all were in the theater in real time to back final guest Paul McCartney on “Hello Goodbye” as Colbert’s family and the Late Show crew and staff joined them all on stage. It was a lovely way to end the show in the theater.

And then, one final sci-fi moment turns the Ed Sullivan Theatre into a snow globe. At that point I half expected Tommy Westphall to come along, but the last shot was of a dog sniffing at the globe and its human telling the dog to come along. My gut reaction — which is all I’m gonna process because it’s late — is that it’s weirdly fitting. Colbert, not of his own volition, turned out the lights not just on his show but on 33 years of The Late Show and CBS making an effort in late night. The network that’s left doesn’t deserve all the good things that came out of that building.

Before the numbers, a few pieces of news from the last couple days.

• NBC will finish this season with the most primetime viewers on network TV (not including streaming) for the first time since 2002, when Friends was the No. 1 show. That breaks a frankly crazy 17-year streak for CBS, and NBC’s win was due in large part to having both the Super Bowl and Winter Olympics in February. Though the last time the network had both of those in the same year, CBS still ended up leading the season (in part because the Olympics ratings were terrible).

• A week after Nemesis premiered on Netflix, its creator, Courtney A. Kemp, is moving to Apple TV under a new overall deal. She’d still be able to work on Nemesis if it’s renewed, but the timing is, uh, a little weird.

• Hulu renewed its Handmaid’s Tale sequel The Testaments for a second season. Season one finishes up next week, and it’s been a pretty strong show. This was entirely obvious in One Battle After Another, but Chase Inifiniti is a fantastic young actor.

• We officially have a Netflix Closing Out Long(ish)-Running Shows trend: Emily in Paris will end with its sixth season, the third such announcement in the past couple weeks after The Lincoln Lawyer (five seasons) and The Night Agent (four).

Onto the numbers and some abbreviated commentary …

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*Even if I took this to another decimal place, 60 Minutes and Marshals would still be tied at 7.365 million viewers. If there’s a difference between the two, it’s literally no bigger than a few hundred people.

(Note: Viewers for nightly newscasts are averages of their weeknight airings, including ones the networks retitle to game the Nielsen numbers. Weekend ones are noted by day.)

*As noted previously, Nielsen measures live sports on Prime Video and they get included in weekly numbers. This was Prime’s biggest game of the playoffs, and also its final one, as the conference finals are on ABC/ESPN and NBC/Peacock.

**The SNL season finale with Will Ferrell and Paul McCartney had the show’s biggest same-day audience of the season.

*Charlize Theron gets Most Dangerous Gamed by Taron Egerton. I haven’t watched it yet, but it feels like a quintessential Netflix movie.

**Euphoria climbs into the overall top 10 so I don’t have to included it in the “rest of the top 10 original series” chart below, even though Nielsen doesn’t classify it as original because HBO Max “acquires” it from HBO’s cable channel

*This is Netflix’s spin on The Traitors, which doesn’t do as well as The Traitors.

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