Jimmy Kimmel returned from his six-day suspension to over six million viewers in late September, playing the free speech martyr to perfection. By October, however, just 1.9 million were still watching, according to a new report.

That 71% drop says a lot about the dire state of late-night television, but conservative donors at the Ziklag Group — a Christian nationalist organisation — seem not to have noticed. They’ve launched an anti-woke alternative to Kimmel and company: a “faith-friendly” late-night show designed to challenge the liberal dominance of network comedy. Their chosen host is Eric Metaxas for The Talk Show is the Yale-educated conservative author and radio personality who once punched an anti-Trump protester outside the 2020 Republican National Convention. Costing between $400,000 and $500,000 to make, the group produced four unwatchable pilot episodes featuring Carrot Top discussing his Bud Light torch prop and Danny Bonaduce reminiscing about the Partridge Family.

Metaxas, articulate but hardly Shane Gillis, opened with this gem: “Harrison Ford will be returning for a fifth Indiana Jones movie. In this one Harrison will find an ancient artefact… by looking in the mirror.” The studio audience responded with the uneasy groans of a lecture class led off course by an out-of-touch professor — which is more or less how Metaxas carried himself on stage. By the time he got to his bit about “a meat-eating plant in Canada” that “got tired of explaining its vegan lifestyle,” the room had all the energy of a church basement.

Even as the Left-wing talk shows slowly fade into obscurity, it bears noting that Right-wing entertainment alternatives almost never work. The Half Hour News Hour, Fox’s 2007 attempt at a conservative Daily Show, scored a 13 out of 100 on Metacritic — the lowest-rated television show in the site’s history. It featured a laugh track that drifted in and out while Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter played the president and vice president without telling a single joke. Most later attempts at “comedy for conservatives” have failed, not because conservatives are inherently unfunny, but for the same reason Left-leaning hosts like Kimmel are struggling: comedy depends on surprise, and partisan humour never surprises anyone.

Greg Gutfeld pulling three million nightly viewers on Fox might seem like evidence of life in the format, but he’s really just an exception that proves the rule — functioning as hospice care, delivering red meat to ageing baby boomers. His idea of comedy? Calling San Francisco “the bidet by the bay” (a recurring line that seems to miss the sanitary point of a bidet) and joking that the homeless should be penned up in a “big, giant bathroom.” These kinds of tired zingers will fade along with his audience.

All these figures stand in stark contrast to the late-night hosts of old. Johnny Carson, who ruled late night from 1962 to 1992, succeeded through a studied neutrality that let him mock politicians without alienating half of his 15 million-strong nightly audience. He refused to discuss his personal politics, resisted his liberal head writer’s attempts to add partisan material, and interviewed everyone from Richard Nixon to Robert F. Kennedy without tipping his hand to any of them. His monologue followed strict rules: no more than three jokes on the same subject, 16 to 22 one-liners total, delivered with the timing of a Swiss watch.

Now, however, infrastructure is too expensive, the format too rigid, the audience too fragmented. Even if the Ellisons — a family closely allied with Trump — remake CBS, there’s no path back to relevance for the nightly talk show that once connected everything. This is a zombie format shambling through the motions while audiences migrate to podcasts, streams, and platforms that don’t require half a million dollars to produce lame material. It’s time to pull the plug.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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