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.
First the numbers. Colbert’s Late Show currently gets an average of 2.417 million live viewers a night. ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live gets 1.772M, NBC’s The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon gets 1.188M, and Comedy Central’s The Daily Show gets 994K.
Conservatives love to point out Fox News’s Gutfeld! gets 3.289M, so it’s really the number one late-night show, not The Late Show. I would point out Gutfeld! airs at 10PM. In the Eastern and Pacific time zones, that’s not late night; that’s prime time. Its competition isn’t Colbert, Kimmel, Fallon and Stewart; it’s police procedural dramas. And actually… those ratings aren’t bad for prime time! Gutfeld! has better ratings than NBC’s Chicago shows, CBS’s NCIS and FBI shows, and ABC’s Batchelor shows.
Now yeah, in the Central and Mountain time zones, Gutfeld! does go head-to-head with the late night shows. While those time zones are predominantly conservative, way more conservatives live on the coasts. (No, really. There are more conservatives in California than in Texas. We got a lot of people!) So in some areas it counts as late night, but not enough. That aside, I have tried to watch Gutfeld! but I don’t find Greg Gutfeld funny. Punching down is bullying disguised as comedy. Lucky for Gutfield, lots of conservatives are cruel.
Okay, all these numbers are the live Nielsen numbers. They don’t include all the people who don’t watch late night TV. That includes me, ’cause I haven’t watched live TV since the early ’10s. Plus I work nights, so I can’t watch it live. I’ve watched The Late Show on Paramount+, but don’t care to watch the entire show; “Meanwhile” annoys me and I don’t care about half the guests. So I watch segments on YouTube. I’ll also watch Kimmel and Daily Show segments, and of course morning-show stuff from CBS Mornings and Morning Joe. All these shows are pretty good about posting segments right after they air in the Eastern time zone—which means in the Pacific zone, where I live, I get ’em early.
But let’s get real: Paramount isn’t as interested in the people who aren’t watching it live. Even though they do make money on the ads YouTube places before and during the clips (and it’s because YouTube insists on running ads during, that I have an ad-blocker on my iPad). Paramount’s main revenue stream comes from broadcast TV advertisers.
And advertisers, let’s be blunt, are cowards. They don’t wanna advertise on political programs! Culture warriors take every little thing and turn it into a “righteous cause,” and scream for boycotts, and it’s way too easy to piss off too many nutjobs. Advertisers want politically neutral stuff, and that’s neither Colbert nor Gutfeld. In order to get ’em, you gotta lower your prices to the point where advertisers will take the risk. (Also where the nutjobs who own companies, who want to support their favorite politics, can actually afford to advertise.) So that’s what both CBS and Fox News does. Both The Late Show and Gutfeld! are making way less money than shows with much lower ratings. So’s The Daily Show.
And unlike other programming, talk shows are disposable. Paramount has to crank out 200+ shows a year, and once they’re watched, they’ve expired. They can air talk-show reruns, but most of the time people will switch channels and watch Kimmel instead. They can’t sell the reruns in a syndication package, because channels won’t buy them unless they’re super old and it’s for the nostalgia factor. (Like watching 50-year-old Carson reruns on PlutoTV, or Letterman’s old clips on his YouTube channel.) People aren’t gonna buy episodes off iTunes or Amazon. The Late Show isn’t gonna get later returns on its investment. It has to pay out today.
You can kinda see why Netflix keeps starting, then axing, talk shows. They want content people will keep rediscovering, and watch again. But as soon as the host starts making fun of President Biden, the viewer will say, “Wait, is this old?” and stop watching.
So is it a legit financial decision? Sure. Paramount could air sitcoms or reruns at 11:35PM, or cut right to the CBSN feed they’re already producing, and get a better return on their investment. All the networks could. And might eventually!
And no, I’m not forgetting the other main reason to put a late-night talk show on your network: To promote your network and movie studio. To promote your own movies and TV shows. Not the ones everybody wants to promote for you, like Tom Cruise movies or Star Trek; the ones CBS dumps a whole lot of money into, but audiences are ho-hum about, so they’re desperate for publicity, and it’s a good thing they own a popular late-night show! But CBS has already been putting those actors on CBS Mornings and Sunday Morning, so my guess is they’ll just go that route. Same as they did in the 1970s and ’80s, when they didn’t have any late-night talk show, and your only late-night choices were Carson or Nightline.
Like I said, it’s a financial decision, but politics is clearly involved. If CBS could produce a late-night show like The Tonight Show, which tries to avoid politics like the plague, they could get advertisers; they could produce something profitable. But you know if they replaced Colbert with some politics-free stooge, liberals would scream bloody murder. Can’t win. Easier to just produce nothing.
For a few years, anyway. Then four years from now, when we have a different president, either because Trump’s 2028 attempted coup fails or he dies of a massive Big Mac-induced coronary, CBS can decide, “Nope, that was a bad decision; we’re bringing back The Late Show!” and hire some non-political standup comedian to host it. And likely will. Just you watch.
