Stephen Colbert’s Late Show Canceled

NPR (“CBS will end ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ next year“):

While taping his Thursday show, host Stephen Colbert made the surprising announcement that CBS is ending his late night show in May.

The live audience at New York’s Ed Sullivan Theater booed when he delivered the news that this would be the show’s final season.

“Yeah, I share your feelings,” he told the audience. “It’s not just the end our our show, but it’s the end of The Late Show on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.”

Colbert has hosted the top-rated show since 2015, taking over for David Letterman.

The news comes just days after Colbert criticized CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, for paying $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump, whom Colbert regularly skewers in his monologues. Trump claimed the network interfered in the 2024 election by editing a 60 Minutes interview with his opponent, Kamala Harris.

The decision to shutter Late Night With Stephen Colbert also comes as Paramount Global seeks Federal Communications Commission approval to merge with Skydance Media, a $8.4 billion agreement.

In a statement, the network said ending the show was a financial decision, “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”

But fans are skeptical. California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff, who was a guest on Thursday’s show, called for more transparency over the decision. “If Paramount and CBS ended The Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know,” he posted on X. ” And deserves better.”

Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and others on social media also weighed in, expressing skepticism about the timing of the decision to end the show.

The NYT report (“Stephen Colbert Laments the Loss of ‘The Late Show’“) also speculates that this is politically motivated:

The network says the cancellation was “purely a financial decision,” but there’s speculation that Colbert’s recent criticism of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was a factor.

Ditto POLITICO (“CBS cancels Stephen Colbert’s show days after Trump settlement criticism“):

Though CBS said in a statement that canceling the show was “purely a financial decision” not related to its performance or content, the announcement follows Colbert’s criticism of a settlement between President Donald Trump and Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company.

Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over edits to an October 2024 interview conducted on CBS’s “60 Minutes” with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Colbert, who frequently skewered Trump on his show, called the settlement a “big fat bribe” on air this Monday.

Press freedom groups and advocates said Trump’s lawsuit, which accused CBS of editing the interview to portray Harris more favorably, was “frivolous” — and the settlement, according to them, will further embolden the president’s attacks against the media.

Some Democratic politicians accused Paramount of engaging in a quid pro quo with the Trump administration to get it to approve the company’s pending multi-billion dollar merger with Skydance Media.

“I don’t know if anything, anything will repair my trust in this company,” Colbert said Monday on his show. “But, just taking a stab at it, I’d say $16 million would help.”

While the Variety report (“CBS to Cancel ‘Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ Citing ‘Financial Decision’“) gives more credence to the network’s explanation:

The maneuver — which ends years of original late-night programming at CBS that started when the network lured David Letterman from NBC in 1993 — comes as the economics of wee-hours TV have begun to accelerate, with media companies growing wary of the high price tags involved in producing the shows while the young viewers they try to attract watch more of them via digital video.

“We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable and will retire ‘The Late Show’ franchise” in May of 2026, CBS executives said in a statement. “We are proud that Stephen called CBS home. He and the broadcast will be remembered in the pantheon of greats that graced late night television. This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”

but does add this:

There has been growing speculation that both Colbert and Jon Stewart, who hosts one broadcast of Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” each week, could be under growing scrutiny from executives at Skydance Media, which is slated to acquire Paramount Global, the parent of both CBS and Comedy Central. David Ellison, who leads Skydance, has projected an image of being intrigued by the politics espoused by President Donald Trump, who Colbert and Stewart routinely skewer in monologues and commentary.

The timing is certainly inauspicious. But the economic argument is certainly plausible. An April 2023 Variety piece (“Night Jitters: TV’s Late Crowd Grapples With Weakness in the Wee Hours“) explains,

It’s no secret among TV executives that the younger people who once stayed up past midnight to watch David Letterman drop objects off a five-story building are not tuning to this generation’s cadre of late-night hosts in the same way. Changing habits like those described above make decades-old late night shows such as “Tonight, “Late Show” or “Late Night” less easy to monetize — and, if executives aren’t careful, less alluring to keep putting on the air one evening after another.

In 2018, seven late night programs — NBC’s “Tonight” and “Late Night,” CBS’ “Late Show” and “Late Late Show,” ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Comedy Central’s “Daily Show” and NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” — drew more than $698 million in advertising in 2018, according to Vivvix, a tracker of ad spending. By 2022, that total came to $412.7 million — a drop of approximately 41% over five years. Fallon, Kimmel, Colbert and the others have all in recent years had to grapple not only with viewers moving to streaming, but with a coronavirus pandemic that forced their shows to embrace performances without a band and live audiences and absences due to infection.

All of this gives Madison Avenue a good reason to try something else. Late-night shows have made themselves more alluring to advertisers by offering product placements, even segments during which the host offers a shout out to a sponsor. But “viewers are seeking out and finding their cut down ‘highlights,’ or moments, rather than making the live episode appointment viewing,” says Dave Sederbaum, executive vice president and head of video investment at Dentsu Media US, a large ad buyer that works for General Motors and Heineken, among others. “My job is to balance our investments in full episodic content as well as highlights in short-form video.”

And so, everyone seems to have night jitters. Over the course of the past few years, NBC has gotten out of the practice of programming a show for 1:30 a.m. after doing so since 1988, and Comedy Central’s portfolio of wee-hours programming has been cut from three to one — and that one, “Daily Show,” has yet to replace Trevor Noah, who abruptly told a studio audience while taping an episode in September that he planned to leave to escape the late-night grind after seven seasons. After James Corden ends his run on CBS’ “The Late Late Show” in the next few days, CBS will cancel the program, even though it has been a fixture on its schedule since Tom Snyder launched it in 1995. In its place, the network is expected to air a revival of the Comedy Central game show “@midnight,” which will cost significantly less than a bells-and-whistles Corden production that includes signature bits like “Carpool Karaoke.”

Others have also been wary. When Conan O’Brien arrived at TBS in 2010, it was seen as a bid to compete more directly with the cable network’s broadcast rivals. But Warner Bros. Discovery, TBS new corporate parent, has made no move to find a replacement since O’Brien departed in 2021, and also cancelled a weekly program from Samantha Bee that emulated late-night antics. Efforts by streamers to harness some of the format’s power have not been successful. Netflix stopped production on a nightly program led by Chelsea Handler, while Hulu canceled a weekly show from Sarah Silverman. Apple currently runs a program featuring the legendary Jon Stewart, but any buzz around it has been minimal — the result, perhaps, of trying to run a series of this sort without the ability to promote it to a big audience turning in regularly to a primetime or daytime schedule. NBCU has tested a show led by Amber Ruffin for Peacock, but is producing fewer episodes as she works on a comedy pilot.

Some of these programs as institutions, but they’re increasingly irrelevant. I was once an avid viewer of the network nightly news and Sunday morning talk shows; I haven’t watched them in close to 20 years now. I subscribed to multiple weekly news magazines for years; I haven’t done so in a very long time.

I came to very much enjoy Colbert during the Bush years, finding his Colbert Report persona genuinely funny and the man himself immensely decent and often courageous. I felt that the show declined during the Obama years, simply because the satirical schtick didn’t work with a president whose politics he shared. I was happy to see him get the Late Show after Letterman’s retirement, but stopped watching pretty quickly.

Like the younger generation, I get whatever bits of these shows I want from YouTube and any number of other places that run clips. Ditto Saturday Night Live, another institutional show I haven’t watched live—or even bothered to record—in years.