Rob Burnett, Marc Maron Talk ‘Late Show’ Cancellation, Late Night’s Future

For Rob Burnett, who worked alongside David Letterman for nearly three decades — including at The Late Show, from its inception — the May 21st conclusion of the late-night franchise stirred significant emotion.

“I found myself being strangely emotional on Stephen [Colbert]’s last show. I didn’t expect it,” Burnett said. “Some of it is just that space and that building. I spent 29 years of my life [there], altogether.”

A five-time Emmy-winner and 31-time nominee, Burnett began his career alongside Letterman as an intern and eventually came to serve as his creative partner in two late-night franchises, plus his production company Worldwide Pants. He told us earlier today, “I remember the day that I walked out of the Ed Sullivan Theater myself, and I felt like I was kind of doing it all again,” watching Colbert go.

During a Zoom appearance alongside Marc Maron, in support of their dramedy In Memoriam, which premieres at the Tribeca Festival at end of week week, the The Late Show‘s former head writer and executive producer said he attributes the end of the franchise to multiple factors.

First, there was “censorship” of Colbert, on the part of the Trump administration, and then, there were economic realities that he believes the administration used “as cover” — the reality that “the financials of all of these shows are not what they used to be.”

Another factor would be what Maron referred to as “the era of self-produced stuff” — the fact that YouTube has become “the easiest way to watch everything,” leaving the traditional powers in entertainment with an uphill battle against the platform for attention.

“You can see it on all levels in show business, that old show business doesn’t know what to do. So they appropriate what they can from new media and glom onto it,” Maron said. “But it’s just sort of the Wild West out there.”

Perhaps there are upsides for creators, Maron said, with the world of entertainment in flux. “But the truth of the matter is, the bar has been lowered completely because of social media platforms and self-producing. People don’t really care if anything has any quality. As a podcaster at the original level of this stuff — and I was never a video podcast — people are opting for parasocial relationships with amateurs over produced media product that was guided and given to us by gatekeepers.”

Maron clarified that he’s “not one to say that I miss the gatekeepers,” but added, “over time — because of Covid and because of the fragmentation of the media universe — it’s amateur hour everywhere.”

Burnett was perhaps a little hesitant to declare late-night dead as a whole, though he acknowledged that those still on network television are “getting crumbs” in viewership compared to Letterman at his heyday — just as Letterman was getting crumbs compared to Johnny Carson, at a time when the entertainment business was in an entirely different place.

The fate of today’s late-night shows is no representation of “fault” on the part of the creatives, he argued, though it may unfortunately be true that a certain version of the late-night show has run its course.

“In the old network model of talk shows…they were like a McDonald’s on an interstate that everyone was driving by and it’s like, ‘Oh, okay, well, we’ve got no place else to go,’” Burnett reflected.

This was a time when celebrities were harder to come by, and when they made an appearance on late-night, it felt special. These days, of course, talent is ubiquitous.

“I personally have dined mightily at the late-night buffet, so I don’t really watch a lot of it just because I’ve had it. But I also have a sense of, yeah, if anything great happens there [today], it’ll find me,” Burnett said in closing. “Whereas it used to not be like that. It used to be like, ‘I want to spend an hour with Dave, I want to spend an hour with Johnny Carson.’ And that’s, I think, over.”

Marking Burnett’s directorial follow-up to The Fundamentals of Caring, a dramedy snapped up by Netflix out of Sundance 2016, In Memoriam has Maron playing a veteran Hollywood actor who, after receiving a terminal cancer diagnosis, becomes obsessed with securing a spot in the Academy Awards’ “In Memoriam” montage. Others in the cast include Lily Gladstone, Judy Greer, Talia Ryder, Michael McKean, Justin Long, Alan Ruck, and Sharon Stone.

For our chat with Burnett and Maron about the film — which we announced almost two years ago — check back later this week.