Stephen Colbert's Late Show hit season-high ratings with a Strike Force Five reunion special, drawing 2.8 million viewers and marking the show's biggest weeknight episode since October 2024.
The Strike Force Five - Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver - originally banded together during the 2023 writers' strike to launch a podcast. The venture was equal parts solidarity and survival: five competitors setting aside rivalry to support their striking writers.
Apparently audiences remembered. And more importantly, they cared.
Late night television has spent the past five years in existential crisis mode. Viewership is down across the board. The format feels outdated. Clips get more YouTube views than full episodes get linear viewers. Every media analyst has declared the genre dead at least twice.
But then something like this happens - five hosts reuniting with genuine camaraderie, telling stories about the strike and the podcast and what it meant to stop competing for one brief moment - and 2.8 million people tune in. That's actual appointment television in 2026.
The lesson isn't that late night is thriving. It's that collaboration works better than competition. The Strike Force Five podcast succeeded because audiences got to see these hosts as real people, not just brand representatives delivering monologue jokes. The reunion special worked for the same reason.
Maybe late night doesn't need to die. Maybe it just needs to evolve beyond the five-shows-competing-for-the-same-audience model. Maybe there's a world where Colbert has Kimmel on once a month and they just talk for an hour. Maybe the format survives by becoming less formatted.
Or maybe this was just a one-night spike driven by nostalgia and curiosity. LateNighter reports that the episode significantly outperformed Colbert's recent average, suggesting this was an event, not a trend.
But for one night at least, late night television proved it can still draw a crowd when it offers something genuinely different. That's not nothing.
