Politics, It Seems, Has Jolted Even the Idiot Box Awake

As the big broadcast networks and ad buyers descend on Manhattan this week for the start of the annual advertising sales season known as upfronts, the Colbert-Fallon role reversal says everything you need to know about the political charge that’s shaking up the television world. The thinking the Spring 2016 was that people wanted a party-like-it’s-1999 late night experience, which Jimmy Fallon and James Corden offered and Stephen Colbert, then struggling in the ratings, presumably did not. Now, as Alexander Nazaryan wrote in the Newsweek piece on Fallon’s new standing, “Americans want rage.” Actually, it seems, a good subset of them want “woke.”