In a celebratory capstone, “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” captured the Emmy for outstanding variety series after ending its 11-year-run in May.
“Thank you so much on behalf of the over 200 people who threw themselves at this show for 11 years to try to do the best show they possibly could for you,” Colbert said, accepting the award.
The win serves as a parting gift for Colbert and a final tribute to the “Late Show” franchise, which began in 1993 with David Letterman and ended with Colbert.
CBS said it was canceling “The Late Show” for financial reasons and that the show was losing tens of millions of dollars a year as advertising for late-night television dried up.
Many were skeptical over that explanation. Paramount, CBS’s parent company, was closing a multibillion-dollar merger with the movie studio Skydance at the time. President Trump was often critiqued on the show and the deal required the Trump administration’s approval to proceed.
Colbert has generally declined to bemoan his fate or openly criticize Paramount. He struck a similar note of grace and modesty on the Emmy stage.
“We hope you enjoyed the show,” he said. “We had a great time doing it for you. That’s it. Thank you.”
“The Late Show,” which also won its category last year, outperformed a crowded field that included “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” “Saturday Night Live,” “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” and “The Daily Show.”
Any or all of those shows could have also won. Because of an arcane rule change, voters were able to endorse multiple or even all of the shows nominated for outstanding variety series.
This odd development has a lot to do with the collapsing state of late-night. Over the past few years, the number of late-night series has drastically declined, and so has advertising revenue.
For the last decade, traditional daily comedic talk shows like “The Daily Show” and “The Late Show” competed in one category (outstanding talk series) and heavily scripted late-night shows with a less frequent cadence like “Saturday Night Live” and “Last Week Tonight” competed in another (outstanding variety sketch series).
Earlier this year, however, the Television Academy made a rule change. Given the “reduced number of submissions” for both categories, as the academy put it, Emmy organizers decided to collapse all the candidates into one category: outstanding variety series.
The academy then decided that a talk show like “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” was so different from a scripted series like “S.N.L.” that the new variety series category had to become a so-called area award.
And what on earth is that?
“A category is usually deemed an area award because the submissions vary so widely that they can’t be directly compared against each other,” a Television Academy spokesman told The Times.
Area awards are usually reserved for technical categories like best choreography in a scripted series or outstanding special effects for a single episode. Now, in the diminished landscape, comedic late-night shows apparently fall under the same banner.
When they submitted their final online ballots in August, Emmy voters were asked to answer “yes” or “no” to a question alongside each variety series nominee: Does this program merit an Emmy? Voters could click “yes” for every nominee if they felt like it.
Any show that earns 90 percent or more “yes” votes wins an Emmy. If multiple shows cross the 90 percent threshold, there would be multiple winners. If no show had hit the 90 percent threshold, the winner would have been whichever had the highest percentage of “yes” votes.
In the end there was only “The Late Show” onstage, for one last time.
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