By Joshua Tyler
| Published
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has been canceled, mainly because no one watches late-night talk shows anymore. If the networks have sense, they’ll also begin canceling the other late-night talk shows. Sorry Jimmys.
Talk shows are an outdated format with no relevance or interest in the modern world. They also aren’t the only TV format that needs cancelling. These are the other TV show formats networks should give up on.
Morning Shows
Morning shows were designed for housewives to watch while they cleaned the kitchen, after they got their kids on the bus and off to school. Housewives no longer exist in any meaningful numbers; women have long since been marched off into the drudgery of the modern workforce. So, it’s not clear who these shows are for anymore. My best guess is nursing home patients.
Morning shows play out like Stone Age versions of Instagram, like TikTok stuck in tar. They mostly still exist because Pharmaceutical companies pay them to trick old people into buying meds they don’t need.
Alternative: Try podcasts. You can listen while you work.
Traditional Game Shows
Survivor ushered in a game show revolution in the early 2000s. Decades later, the old, outdated traditional game show style it replaced is still on the air. Spinning wheels, guessing letters, trivia under bright lights—haven’t evolved meaningfully in decades. They rely on artificial tension, canned applause, and low-stakes prizes that feel irrelevant in a streaming, interactive world.
You’re better off watching slot machine videos on YouTube. And if you’re looking for gaming, tune in to a relevant modern game show like Netflix’s The Devil’s Plan.
Alternative: Try social strategy games. Survivor is still great, Big Brother is consistent, and Korea has amazing shows like The Devil’s Plan and The Genius.
Clip Shows
We have YouTube. What are we doing here, people?
Procedural Crime Shows
Thanks to the internet, we now know that real police work bears no resemblance to the propaganda we’ve been fed on television by police procedurals. So now, they feel like relics from a dumber, slower age.
They could still be fun if they were mystery-driven detective shows with colorful lead characters like Murder She Wrote or Columbo (and you should definitely stream those old episodes). The Knives Out movie franchise has done a great job of cashing in on this. Sadly, that’s not what a modern police procedural is.
Instead, watching a police procedural is like choosing to flip over an iPhone and stare at the back of the device.
Alternative: Try true crime podcasts. They’re more engaging and they’re real.
Multi-Cam Sitcoms
Once the gold standard of network comedy, sitcoms now play like museum exhibits of a time when jokes were louder than stories and characters never changed. The canned laughter, the static sets, the punchline-pause-punchline rhythm—it’s all painfully artificial in a world where audiences want to feel something real.
Shows like Friends and Seinfeld had their moment, but replicating their format in 2025 is like releasing a new car with a crank starter. Treasure those classic sitcoms, but let the format go.
Alternative: Try dramedies like The Bear or Ted Lasso.
National News Broadcasts
It’s unclear if the news ever delivered accurate information, but what’s certain is that it doesn’t now. Whether it’s Fox News, ABC News, or CNN, they’re all corrupted by advertisers and political bias, and can’t be trusted.
Even if the average news program could be trusted, they’re objectively worse at delivering the news quickly and efficiently than five minutes spent scrolling X or reading a detailed Reddit thread.
News opinion shows will probably always have a place as rage bait, but Brett Baier and Anderson Cooper’s “just the facts” masquerade should probably go away. We’re not buying it.
Alternative: The entire internet.
Awards Shows
Award shows used to be events—glitzy, glamorous, and worth gathering around the TV for. Now they’re bloated, self-congratulatory marathons nobody asked for. In the age of instant reactions, viral moments, and decentralized fandoms, watching Hollywood pat itself on the back for three hours feels tone-deaf and wildly out of touch.
Viewers aren’t tuning in to see who wins; they’re checking X for the one clip that’ll trend. Ratings are in freefall for a reason—people are tired of the forced relevance, the endless monologues, and the illusion of prestige. The red carpet’s gone cold. It’s time to roll it up.
Alternative: TikTok. Nobody does narcissism better.
