One read of late-night's 2026 contraction goes like this: a format aged out, audiences fragmented, and CBS made a business decision about a show whose economics no longer worked. David Letterman, sitting for an essay about the end of The Late Show, told a sharper story. He talked about ownership slipping away, about new corporate hands he does not trust, about a program he built being closed instead of passed on. The second account is the more useful one, because it treats the show as something with a history rather than a line item. To think carefully about what is actually ending in 2026, skip another column about ratings or politics and start with how this particular chair came to matter, and who shaped the room around it.
The easy framing right now is that late-night is a casualty of streaming, or a casualty of politics, and you are supposed to pick a team. Neither story explains why losing this specific show, in this specific theater, feels like more than a slot change on a network schedule. The Ed Sullivan Theater was never a neutral container, and the 11:35 hour was never interchangeable with any other. Letterman's complaint about the new owners only makes sense once you understand what he believed he was handing off, and what Colbert inherited when he took the desk in 2015. That history is missing from the trade press write-ups. It sits further back, in the Carson years and the strange apprenticeship that produced the modern host. Which is where Laurence Leamer's biography becomes useful company.
Leamer's King of the Night is a life of Johnny Carson, and it is the book to sit with if you want to understand why the closing of The Late Show registers as a civic event rather than a programming note. Carson is the figure every subsequent host, including Letterman and Colbert, has been measured against, and Leamer treats him as both a craftsman and a difficult man rather than a monument. The biography is strongest on the mechanics of the job.
Leamer is interested in the small daily decisions that built trust with a national audience over three decades: monologue rewrites in the late afternoon, the way Carson protected guests who were dying onstage, the cold professionalism that kept the show watchable night after night. Read alongside Letterman's recent comments about ownership, this material does real work. It shows you what a host actually accumulates when a show runs long enough, and why losing that accumulation in a corporate transition feels like a private grief rather than a public one.
The portrait of Carson the person is less flattering, and Leamer does not soften it. There is the distance from his sons, the four marriages, the drinking, the long silences with people who thought they were close to him. If you came hoping for warmth, the book will test you. The argument seems to be that the discipline required to be that reliable in public was paid for somewhere, and the somewhere was usually his own house. The book is thinner on the cultural stakes of the desk itself. Leamer is good on Carson's politics of restraint, the deliberate refusal to tell you who he voted for, but he is incurious about what that restraint cost or concealed. A more skeptical biographer would press harder on whether Carson's neutrality was a public good or a convenient brand, especially through the Vietnam and Watergate years when the monologue was one of the few rooms where the country talked to itself. Leamer notes the choices and declines to interrogate them. That is the book's real limitation, and worth flagging before you hand it to someone expecting an argument as well as a life. Still, the through-line is clear enough to be useful. Carson built a kind of trust specific to broadcast scarcity, three networks and a shared clock, and he handed it to Letterman, who handed a version of it to Colbert. Leamer lets you see that chain as a chain, with all its compromises and inheritances, instead of as a nostalgic fog. When Letterman says the new CBS owners do not understand what they are closing, the biography gives you the vocabulary to take that complaint seriously without taking it on faith.
King of the Night will not tell you what CBS should have done in 2026, and Leamer is not in the business of writing eulogies for shows still cooling. What it offers is the long memory the current conversation is missing. You finish it with a sturdier sense of what a late-night host actually does when the job is done well, what the work costs the person doing it, and why a network closing the door on that work is a decision worth arguing about instead of absorbing. If the Letterman essay caught your attention, this is the next place to put it.