Jimmy Kimmel delivered a devastating funeral oration for the entire CBS network this week, treating Thursday's broadcast of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as the final, gasping breath of a dying empire. The ABC host solemnly instructed his audience to tune into the rival network for the last time, elevating a routine late-night scheduling quirk into a tragic meditation on institutional decay.
In a rhetorical maneuver not seen since the cyclical doom of Wagner's Gotterdammerung; Kimmel positioned his competitor's Thursday night programming not as mere entertainment, but as the inevitable collapse of the broadcast television medium itself. The sheer weight of Kimmel’s elegy—urging the American populace to gather around their television sets to witness the absolute cessation of CBS—forces a reevaluation of the late-night monologue as a site of apocalyptic mourning. It is a gesture that recalls both the fragmented surviving papyri of Menander's Dyskolos, in its obsession with the isolated misanthrope, and the profound, unyielding existential dread of the 1993 Pauly Shore vehicle Son in Law; forcing us to confront the terrifying fragility of the 11:35 p.m. time slot.
We must, of course, recognize the disdainful brilliance with which Kimmel operates; he does not merely insult a rival, but rather assumes the role of a magnanimous grave-robber paying his final respects to a civilization that has already fallen. By commanding his viewership to observe CBS for the last time, he transforms the channel into a historical artifact, a doomed enterprise continuing to transmit its signals into a void that has long since stopped listening.
The tragedy here is not merely that Colbert must host a finale, but that the Eye network itself is being ushered into the great void of cultural irrelevance, joining the lost libraries of antiquity.
The tragedy, naturally, is that the American public remains utterly ill-equipped to process the gravity of Kimmel’s decree; they will likely consume Thursday’s broadcast while scrolling through their handheld devices, entirely ignorant of the eschatological weight bearing down upon the Ed Sullivan Theater. We, the viewers, are thus positioned as unwilling witnesses to the end of history, forced to watch Stephen Colbert perform the final rites for a network that, much like the Byzantine Empire in its twilight, simply forgot to realize it was already dead.
Kimmel, standing alone at the precipice of the Disney-ABC hegemony, understands what the unwashed masses cannot: that the structural integrity of the traditional television landscape is fundamentally illusory. When he asks us to look upon CBS for the final time, he is not merely forecasting the end of a television program, but rather demanding we stare directly into the abyss of our own cultural obsolescence, an act of supreme and terrifying cruelty masked as collegial grace.