I was midway through my second glass of Sancerre at Le Bernardin, sharing a rather exquisite halibut with a former executive vice president of CBS programming, when the news reached our table. My companion’s assistant approached, pale and trembling, holding a smartphone like it was a live explosive. She informed us that Stephen Colbert, a man who just Thursday had concluded a dignified, advertiser-supported run on network television, had launched a YouTube channel over the weekend.
My dining companion dropped his fork. I signaled for the check. There are some tragedies that simply ruin the appetite.
We are living in an era of unprecedented institutional decay, but I never expected to see the collapse of the late-night television hierarchy happen this quickly, or this voluntarily. For decades, there has been a prescribed path for a broadcaster who steps down from the sacred desk. Johnny Carson retreated to a cliffside estate in Malibu to play tennis and ignore the public. David Letterman grew a tremendous beard and occasionally emerged to be interviewed by people who respected his legacy. They did not immediately pivot to vlogging.
Yet, here we are. It has not even been a full week since the final episode of The Late Show aired, and Stephen Colbert has quietly debuted a channel featuring a single video titled Only In Monroe --- May 22, 2026. The temporal confusion of the title aside, the medium itself is an insult to the craft of television.
Let us examine the indignity of this maneuver. YouTube is not a broadcast network. It is a digital flea market. It is a place where teenagers unbox Japanese candy, where grown men scream at video games, and where people teach you how to fix a leaky faucet in exchange for fractions of a penny in programmatic advertising. To see a member of the late-night fraternity voluntarily place his content adjacent to a compilation of cats falling off furniture is nothing short of heartbreaking.
I am told by people who understand these grim digital metrics that the channel has already garnered more than 120,000 subscribers. The media press is treating this as a success. It is a symptom of our collective delusion that we allow the word subscriber to be used for someone who simply clicked a digital button for free.
A true subscriber is someone who pays eighty dollars a month for a premium cable package they do not fully understand. A true viewer is someone who falls asleep with the television on and wakes up confused during a pharmaceutical commercial at three in the morning. These 120,000 digital vagrants are not an audience. They are an algorithmically gathered mob.
It is a profound tragedy when a man who once commanded a union crew of two hundred professionals reduces himself to the labor output of a teenager in a gaming chair.
Think of the infrastructure that Colbert has abandoned. Network television is a miracle of modern bureaucracy. There are lighting directors, sound engineers, demographic consultants, standards and practices executives who will spend three weeks arguing over a single double entendre. There is a craft services table stocked with slightly stale bagels and an urn of lukewarm coffee.
This is how art is made. By stripping away the bloated corporate apparatus, Colbert is removing the friction that makes television great. He is just a man pointing a camera at himself. It is distressingly intimate. It lacks the cold, alienating distance that a true star must maintain from their audience.
Furthermore, what is Only In Monroe? I have watched the video. It appears to be an homage to, or perhaps an actual broadcast of, a local public access program. Public access was a necessary evil in the days before we had five hundred channels of prestige drama, but it is not something a wealthy entertainer should be mimicking on the internet. It is a betrayal of the coastal media elite to pretend to be broadcasting from Monroe, wherever that might be. If one must perform on the internet, one should at least do it from a sanitized studio in Burbank.
I recently sat on a panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival regarding the future of linear television, and I made the point that the greatest threat to our industry is not cord-cutting, but a loss of self-respect. If our stars no longer believe they are better than the people watching them on smartphones, the entire illusion collapses.
When a late-night host sits behind a mahogany desk on a raised platform, wearing a tailored suit, he is projecting authority. He is telling the American people what to think about the news of the day, sandwiching his wisdom between a monologue and an interview with an actress promoting a superhero film. It is a delicate, beautiful ecosystem.
On YouTube, there is no mahogany desk. There is no band playing a funk cover of a Steely Dan song to transition into a commercial break. There is only the algorithm, a cruel and unfeeling math equation that will inevitably suggest the viewer watch a video about ancient aliens immediately after Colbert finishes speaking.
I must confess, I find the haste of this transition to be the most troubling aspect. Less than a week! There was no mourning period. There was no time for the network to air a series of retrospective specials hosted by Gayle King. There was no time for me to write a multi-part series mourning the end of an era. Colbert simply logged on and started uploading. It shows a shocking lack of regard for the media columnists who rely on these transitions for content.
I reached out to several of my contacts at the major talent agencies, and they are equally baffled. A man of Colbert's stature should be entering a lucrative holding deal. A holding deal is the ultimate mark of success in Hollywood. It is a contract where a studio pays you millions of dollars a year to do absolutely nothing while they figure out what to do with you. It is dignified. It is respectful. It does not require asking people to smash a like button.
Perhaps this is just a phase. Perhaps Colbert, intoxicated by the sudden freedom from network censors and the grueling daily schedule, is merely acting out. We all do foolish things when a long-term relationship ends. Some people buy a sports car. Some people get a terrible haircut. Stephen Colbert launched a YouTube channel.
I am willing to forgive this transgression, provided he comes to his senses quickly. There is still time to delete the channel. There is still time to issue a press release stating that the account was hacked, or that it was an avant-garde performance art piece funded by a European grant.
We will welcome him back into the fold with open arms. We will find him a nice, respectable streaming series that will be canceled after one season for a tax write-off, just as God intended. But he must stop this digital panhandling immediately.
Television is a sacred trust. It is not something to be tossed casually onto the same platform where people watch pimples being popped. I implore Stephen Colbert to look in the mirror, straighten his tie, and remember who he is. He is a network star. And network stars do not upload.