James Corden’s stale, gimmicky Late Late Show finale was a fitting end for TV’s quintessential late-night host

It’s easy to pick on James Corden. For whatever reason, the former Gavin and Stacey star has become, over the past decade or so, one of the most polarising and ridiculed TV personalities the world over. The public will take any excuse to dig at him. His widely publicised restaurant ban over alleged rudeness to staff. His execrable singing turns in screen musicals like Cats, Cinderella, or The Prom. His skin-crawling argument with Patrick Stewart onstage at the 2010 Glamour Awards. When, in 2015, Corden moved out to LA to front his own CBS talk series – taking over The Late Late Show from Scottish-American comic Craig Ferguson – the launch was met with a healthy dollop of scepticism. (“Britain’s loss is America’s loss also,” quipped the comedian Stewart Lee.) And yet, eight years and some 1,200 episodes later, few could say it was the wrong call.

In the early hours of Friday morning, Corden bowed out of his Late Late Show role for good. Reports suggested that he had turned down a deal worth $40m to renew his contract; Corden has cited a desire to move back to London and spend more time with his family as the motivating factor behind his decision. The finale pretty much encapsulated everything his talk show had become known for. There were big-name guests: Will Ferrell, who took a sledgehammer to Corden’s now-defunct desk, series favourite Harry Styles, Tom Cruise, a cadre of Corden’s late-night competitors, and even Joe Biden. There was singing. There was dancing. There was a moment of eating animal testicles. Towards the end of the show, Corden addressed his audience with candour, reflecting on a world that had changed substantially over the past eight years.

The finale marks the end of an era – although what exactly the James Corden Era of late-night TV signified is still up for debate. After all, his was a show that many perceived as shallow and lowbrow, a show whose success was built on the popularity of its gimmicky “Carpool Karaoke” segment. A show that was caught pilfering material. (Corden admitted to “inadvertently” repeating an old Ricky Gervais bit, while “obviously not knowing it came from him”.) Under his tenure, The Late Late Show was unimaginative and seldom funny – as likely at any one time to induce full-body cringing as it was to raise a chuckle. And yet, who’s to say he wasn’t the quintessential 21st-century talk show host?

Corden’s arrival brought about an immediate uptick in viewership from Ferguson’s later years. This dropped off quickly, however. To some extent, there’s a pretty hard ceiling on how many viewers any TV show can pull down when it’s airing at 12:37am, and changing viewing habits have only made it harder: a New York Times report from last year noted that total viewership on the two preeminent “late late” shows (Corden’s and Late Night with Seth Meyers on NBC) plummeted by nearly a third between 2017 and 2022 (from 2.8 million to 1.9 million). By other measures, though, Corden’s show was a raging success. Its YouTube channel features pages of videos with eight- or nine-figure view counts; Adele’s first Carpool Karaoke appearance managed more than a quarter of a billion hits. Its 12 Emmy nominations (with one win) are also nothing to be scoffed at.

It helped that Corden was never competing with the gravitas of Johnny Carson or David Letterman, or even the easy-going flippancy of Jay Leno. The heyday of the talk show has long passed; Corden’s contemporaries were presenters like Stephen Colbert, Seth Meyers, and the Jimmys, Fallon and Kimmel. (For the sake of clarity, I use the phrase “talk show” to refer specifically to US-based late night series, as opposed to their similar but tonally distinct British cousin, the “chat show”.) Among these, there are variations of course – Colbert aims for a slightly more middlebrow, Letterman-esque sensibility; Fallon interviews often deteriorate into fawning yuck-ups – but they are, by and large, different labels on the same product.

The aim of the game is simple: a punchy hour of TV – a topical opening monologue, two or three guests, maybe a skit or two – that can be harvested into a collection of clicky standalone YouTube videos. Every talk show follows this blueprint now, and Corden, for his sins, was great at it. Unencumbered by the need for journalistic rigour or deep sincerity, his show instead embraced the lighter side of light entertainment. It’s hard to imagine any of the other talk titans overseeing a segment in which Harry Styles gets a real tattoo of the show’s logo, live on air.

Corden’s CV features a list of interviewees that would make most seasoned presenters green with envy – among them Adele, Tom Hanks, Kanye West, Madonna and Prince Harry. Does he get them to say anything interesting? Not really! But if you ever wanted to see Hazza drink tea atop an open-topped bus, or tour the house from The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air for some reason, then look no further. The flip side of this is that when, on occasion, Corden did let the cheeky chappy facade drop, it proved remarkably effective. In the aftermath of the Manchester bombing, for instance, Corden’s sincere, tasteful monologue ended up going viral.

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His departure from CBS doesn’t exactly have the resonance of Johnny Carson’s momentous farewell episode. Nor has it provoked the enthusiastic outpouring of goodwill that, say, Conan O’Brien did when he stepped down from Conan in 2021. I suppose on some level this is simply a matter of longevity: eight years isn’t all that substantial in the world of late-night television. There’s also Corden’s bruised public image to consider. Between the restaurant debacle and a number of other PR snafus – Mel B branding him one of “the biggest d***heads in showbiz”; a resurfaced video in which he is unable to name his own staff – some people are, to put it bluntly, sick of him.

But it would be wrong to write off Corden as just another talk show hack. No, he was a talk show hack extraordinaire. It’s no surprise that CBS have opted against trying to fill Corden’s hosting vacancy; The Late Late Show is instead being replaced with a rebooted version of the old panel show @midnight. Figures like Corden – with the capacity to inspire fervent reactions in viewers; a provocateur not in action, but in vibe – are few and far between. They say there’s a thin line between love and hatred. By that metric, Corden has gone out as one of the most adored men in the world.