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Vince Vaughn Knows Exactly Why Late-Night Television Is Failing

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  March 27, 2026 8:30 AM

This is a refreshing moment of sanity from Hollywood. Actor Vince Vaughn nailed exactly why late-night television is failing, and it's all political.

As Townhall noted back in January, 99 percent of late-night guests were liberal for the last six months of 2025. It was the same for the first six months of 2025 and the last six months of 2024, too. The study looked at "Jimmy Kimmel Live," "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert," "Late Night with Seth Meyers," "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," and "The Daily Show."

And when it came to partisan officials, the shows had 31 Democrats and zero Republicans. Stephen Colbert led the pack with 17 Democratic politicians.

Rather than focusing on entertainment, late-night television turned into another campaign arm of the DNC.

Vaughn shared those thoughts on Theo Von's podcast.

Here's more:

Von said Hollywood is a “liberal place” and Vaughn added an addendum: “But not really. It’s more like, ‘We’re smart and got it figured out, and if you don’t agree then you’re an idiot.'” He continued, “There was definitely a culture that if you didn’t agree with these ideas, you were looked at as bad.”

This attitude, said Von and Vaughn, bled into the late-night TV landscape, plaguing the programs hosted by Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and more. (Vaughn and Von did not name names.)

“A lot of the late shows have struggled because … the only person they could make fun of at a certain point was white, redneck kind of people, and then everything tanked after that,” said Von.

“The podcasts have gotten so much more popular with less production, less writers, less staff. And the reason is … people want authenticity,” added Vaughn. “The talk shows, to a large part, became really agenda-based. They were going to [evangelize] people to what they thought. And so people just rejected it because it didn’t feel authentic. It felt like they had an agenda. It stopped being funny, and it started feeling like I was in a f***ing class I didn’t want to take. I’m getting scolded.”

Politics is downstream of culture, too.

There are a handful more who are openly conservative and/or sane.

People watch television, sports, and movies to escape politics. Democrats infuse it into everything.

They don't make them like Carson anymore.

Podcasts are also political, but they're open about it and entertaining. Joe Rogan's podcast has a wide range of guests and topics, unlike late-night shows, which skew hard Left and aren't particularly funny anymore.