You might’ve been in denial it was coming, but here it is.
On 17 July, Stephen Colbert personally announced on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, his CBS talk show, that the show will end in May 2026. He’s not being replaced; CBS is getting out of the late-night talk show business. “This is all just going away,” Colbert said. CBS’s parent company, Paramount, claims it’s an economic decision: The Late Show has been losing them between $40 and $50 million a year.
It’s caused backlash from Colbert fans, particularly from those fans who suspect Paramount isn’t really cancelling the show for economic reasons—citing the movie studio’s purchase by Skydance Media, which the Federal Communications Commission, staffed with Donald Trump cronies, has to sign off on. Plus the recent $16 million payoff CBS made to Trump to get him to drop his frivolous lawsuit against 60 Minutes (and the fact 60 Minutes’s showrunner Bill Owens quit on 22 April, citing editorial interference from CBS management). Plus of course Trump crowing on his social media platform Truth Social how he got Colbert cancelled. Trump lies all the time, but here’s a statement which liberals want to believe.
The idea’s still stunned a lot of people. I remember when CBS desperately wanted to get into the late-night game; Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show was getting crazy ratings, and CBS tried out The Pat Sajak Show against him in 1989, and it just bombed hard. Sajak was fine as the game-show host of Wheel of Fortune, but nobody wanted to watch him tell lame jokes and interview C-list celebrities. Nope, he couldn’t get A-list celebrities, ’cause Carson’s producer, Fred de Cordova, rigged the game: If you did any other late-night show, you were banned from The Tonight Show for 10 weeks. The Pat Sajak Show just couldn’t get the guests.
Funny thing… at the very same time The Pat Sajak Show began, Paramount launched The Arsenio Hall Show, and CBS distributed it in syndication. And it did get the ratings. In fact it started to chip away at Carson’s ratings. That’s because Hall had all the guests Carson wouldn’t even think of having on his show, i.e. black people. Plus people whom youngsters like me wanted to see: Rock stars, hip-hop artists, wrestlers, MTV personalities. If CBS had aired Hall’s show instead of Sajak’s, they’d’ve had a late-night franchise in the 1980s, and not had to wait till the ’90s.
But what happened, as most of you know already, is Carson retired, NBC gave The Tonight Show to Jay Leno instead of Carson’s designated successor David Letterman, Letterman quit NBC and moved to CBS, and The Late Show with David Letterman began in 1993. Aired 22 years. Colbert succeeded Letterman in 2015.
Now. As to why the show’s getting cancelled… well honestly, I believe Paramount. It’s a financial decision. It’s not the right financial decision; it’s just the quickest and dirtiest one, and one they’re gonna regret and try to undo later. And the reason they had to make this decision… actually also comes down to politics. Yeah, I’ll explain.
