Tonight will mark not the passing of a torch, but instead the end of an era. Tonight, the last episode of The Late Show will air. Media historians in the future will probably look back at this as a turning point, signalling the end of the dominance of late-night broadcast television comedians to provide humor and ridicule about current events and the news. For me, this is a sad milestone.

Just to warn everyone up front: this is going to be more of a personal memoir than a deep analysis of popular culture trends. By writing it, I am definitely "dating" my own experiences as a member of the post-baby-boom generation. "The Posties" never really caught on, but I still like it as a "cusp of two generations" moniker. Later, we were called the "Me Generation" or perhaps the "MTV Generation" (or perhaps somewhere between the two), but I still like the breakfast-cereal zing of being one of the "Posties."

Sorry... where was I? Oh, right, warning everyone that this would be a dated and rather personal look back.

The only late-night television I ever paid attention to while growing up as a kid was Saturday Night Live, which I began watching after my older sibling discovered it and turned me on to it. I can't remember whether I started watching during the first season or the second, but it was definitely with the original "Not Ready For Prime Time Players" cast. But that was just on the weekends. During the week, I never stayed up late enough to watch The Tonight Show (too late for school nights!).

This changed when I was at college. I had a friend who actually had her own television in her dorm room! We were just casual friends, but she let me watch late-night shows with her whenever I wanted to. To understand the impact of this statement requires anyone younger than myself to harken their minds back to a stone-knives-and-bearskins prehistoric time, for it may be shocking to hear that pretty much nobody on campus had access to television at the time (early 1980s). There was -- are you sitting down, young folk? -- precisely one community television on campus, located in a communal space (not in any dorm). And personal televisions just weren't a thing, really. But this one girl I knew had a teeny-tiny miniature television set and she loved watching late-night. I started hanging around her room when the shows would come on, which is where I first met Johnny Carson (The Tonight Show) and David Letterman (Late Night).

Again, for younger viewers, this was before the dawn of, well... everything. It wasn't just pre-streaming and pre-internet times, it was pre-computer times. There were a few computers on campus, shared by all in a communal space (but the typewriters were used much more, for typing papers). The number of students with a computer on their dorm room desks on campus (portables and laptops just did not exist) could be counted on the fingers of one hand (or possibly even "one finger"). We didn't have phones in our rooms. Each dorm hall shared one pay phone, and one in-house on-campus phone. Portable phones barely existed, were insanely expensive, and roughly the size of a brick. Nobody had a camera in their pocket -- if you wanted to take pictures, you had to own a camera and film and lug it all around with you.

Like I said, stone knives and bear skins. But hey, we did manage to have fun nonetheless!

Anyway, so having regular access to a television (any television!) as a college student at a small liberal-arts college was a strange and wonderful sort of thing. And discovering that there was comedy on late at night during the week was a revelation. So I watched some of the later years of Carson and the earliest years of Letterman, and laughed along with all their antics (Letterman was so astonishingly and endearingly screwball in those early years!).

Then for a period of roughly a decade or so, I ignored television completely. I didn't own one and the lack never bothered me much (until The Simpsons debuted, at least). In the 1990s I did finally break down and get a television, and by that point a rather extraordinary change had happened. Polling around then showed that most people in America actually got their news not from traditional media sources, but from late-night comics joking about it.

Think about that for a second. Again, the age of the internet had (barely) dawned, but download speeds were so slow that video (streaming) just wasn't a practical choice. Websites barely existed and were incredibly crude and mostly text-based. The "big three" television networks had grown to the "big four" (with the addition of Fox), and cable channels were on the rise, challenging their supremacy. In this limited media environment, broadcast television was still king of late night, and people were ignoring the morning and evening news broadcasts in favor of catching up on the news before they went to bed, in irreverent style. So much so that learning the news of the day on late-night had actually overtaken all other media sources for news, for the majority of Americans.

This meant, when I started my career of writing about politics, that I pretty much had to watch late-night, to see what millions of other Americans were laughing about. But I didn't mind, being a night-owl sort of guy in general.

Somewhere in here (I am not going to get into the whole saga of changes), late-night had grown. Carson left The Tonight Show, and was replaced by Jay Leno. Letterman, miffed at not being hired to replace Carson, decamped for another network and started The Late Show, while Conan O'Brien took over his old slot on Late Night. Bill Maher appeared on Politically Incorrect. Even Fox got in on the act with Mad TV.

Viewers had a plethora of choices, and late-night television was a very big deal indeed. But this dominance didn't last forever. Eventually, other media began to eat into late-night's popularity in a bigger and bigger way. While more and more comedians appeared on late-night, their audiences began to shrink. My favorites from these later years would have to be Wanda Sykes (who astonishingly was given a late-night slot on Fox for a short and hilarious run) and Craig Ferguson, who I personally thought was the funniest host ever to appear on late-night (for his irreverence for just about everything, because he authentically and honestly just did not care what his audience -- or the network -- thought about how he ran his show). While on an unrelated trip to Los Angeles, I even attended a taping of a Craig Ferguson show -- the only television show I've ever bothered to sit in an audience for.

Comics came and comics went, and shows got cancelled here and there. The landscape of late-night shrank slowly. Now we are down to choosing between Jimmy Fallon (NBC), Jimmy Kimmel (ABC), and (for tonight, at least) Stephen Colbert (CBS). The late-late slot has essentially shrunk down to one -- Seth Meyers on NBC.

When the executives at CBS announced they were cancelling Colbert -- ending a show that had only ever had two hosts (Letterman and then Colbert) in its 33-year history -- they said it was a financial decision. They said the show was just losing too much money. Nobody believed them, because Colbert was obviously being fired for two big reasons: a pending merger of CBS's parent corporation that Donald Trump could have halted, and Colbert's willingness to call the corporate executives out for knuckling under to Trump's thuggery.

Colbert certainly isn't the first late-night host to get the axe due to political jokes or shocking statements. Bill Maher left broadcast television after he said a few things just after 9/11 that were deemed too controversial (he is still on the air on cable, however). ABC almost knuckled under to Trump as well, briefly pulling Kimmel off the air after Trump had a tantrum about a joke he had told, but there was a rather large audience pushback that convinced the network to bring him back after a week's absence. I guess it's the fact that Colbert wasn't just fired -- his whole show was cancelled -- that was really shocking.

That's why it really does feel like the end of an era. Oh, NBC will probably keep soldiering on, since The Tonight Show is really the granddaddy of them all and has a certain "television history" cachet to it, but it doesn't seem likely that the other networks are going to try anything new in terms of late-night comedy/interview shows, at least not anytime soon (perhaps after Trump leaves office -- but even that's doubtful).

For now, we've still got the Jimmys to watch. And after they're done, there's Seth.

But Stephen Colbert will be missed, in a big and meaningful way. And I know I'm not the only one who feels this way, either.

It's the end of an era.

So tune in tonight, 11:35 P.M. on CBS, for the last-ever episode of The Late Show.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant