Thursday marked the end of an era, albeit a brief one. CBS’s After Midnight hosted by Taylor Tomlinson, and executive produced by fellow CBS comedian Stephen Colbert, aired its last episode early Friday morning.
After Midnight was originally advertised as a different kind of late night show. There would be no monologues, just a game show where a trio of comedians would improv answers to the host’s questions, usually based off of some viral social media post. However, starting on May 20, 2024, Tomlinson began most shows with a monologue.
It quickly became clear that there was a startling slant: A NewsBusters study finds 87 percent of the political jokes were about conservatives or Republicans.
Throughout the 13 months and 141 episodes since she began doing a monologue, Tomlinson told 187 jokes mocking conservatives or the GOP. That left 27 jokes, or 13 percent, about liberals or Democrats and one joke, or less than half a percent, about nonpartisan groups.
Her top ten targets included only two liberal individuals or groups. Donald Trump drew by far the most jokes (82), followed by Elon Musk (21), JD Vance (10), Edward “Big Balls” Coristine of the DOGE team, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth (6 each). Then came Democrats, Mark Zuckerberg, MAGA/Trump supporters, Eric Trump, and Joe Biden (5 each).
Tomlinson’s average number of jokes per episode was significantly less than her contemporaries, but simply counting jokes does not by itself convey After Midnight’s eventual descent in becoming just another liberal late night comedy show. If Tomlinson will have any legacy as a short-tenured late night host, it will be in her fangirling over alleged health insurance CEO Brian Thompson assassin and terrorist Luigi Mangione.
Here is a video montage put together by NewsBusters’s Bill D'Agostino documenting that fandom:
It wasn’t just alleged terrorists that Tomlinson swooned over. When CBS colleague Margaret Brennan broke the rules of the 2024 VP debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz by interrupting and eventually cutting the former’s microphone, Tomlinson shared, “before anyone asks, yes, I masturbated to this. A woman, silencing men? Yeah, that's going in the spank bank.”
After Trump was re-elected, Tomlinson mourned, “It was a huge night for Republicans, they also took the Senate, and a lot of the news media is asking whether or not a Republican Senate will 'keep Trump in check.' Which feels like asking the getaway driver of a bank robbery, 'So, you're gonna make sure they spend the money wisely, right? You're going to save half for taxes and donate to sustainable charities? Right?'"
Claiming that Trump’s win was the death of democracy, she added, “If your friend dies, you go to the funeral and say, 'I really miss my friend.' You don't go to the funeral and immediately scream, 'Volunteer at the library!' Like yes, okay, I'll volunteer at the library, but let me bury democracy first.”
Her small number of jokes about Democrats were more like demands the party “man up” and fight with “bigger balls” or lamentations about the party’s inability to stop Trump’s “fascism.”
Outside of her monologue, the games were mostly meant to be fun and, ironically, almost a form of escapism. Occasionally, politics would creep in, but the worst part of them was when Tomlinson made it seem like she needed to prove that she has moved past her religious and conservative upbringing. In one episode, she invited a trio of drag queens on to mock Pope Francis’s claim that “excessive scrolling causes ‘brain rot.’”
BenDeLaCreme claimed Francis has “So much that he has brain rot, or, sorry, Catholicism. I always get these two confused,” while Peaches Christ claimed Francis “is online so much that he calls shirtless pictures of Jesus thirst traps.”
In another episode, Jay Jurden claimed that God “hates gay people” and Bassem Youssef went the other way and claimed “Jesus was gay.”
As After Midnight goes off the air, it is also facing a hostile workplace lawsuit from one of its former script supervisors. CBS will be replacing After Midnight with old episodes of Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen for the 2025-26 season. The network previously used the show to fill the gap after Tomlinson’s predecessor, James Corden, departed The Late Late Show not long before the 2023 Writers’ Strike.
