TV shows come and go, but rarely is there a cancellation this surprising: On Thursday, CBS announced it is axing The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, effective May 2026. And they won’t be looking for a replacement host, either; the late-night show, which has been on the air since 1993 when the network lured David Letterman away from NBC, will cease to exist entirely.
“This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” CBS executives said in a statement. “It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount. Our admiration, affection and respect for the talents of Stephen Colbert and his incredible team made this agonizing decision even more difficult.”
The fact that the network feels that having a late-night show — even one that has been No. 1 in the ratings for eight years — is no longer financially viable feels hugely significant to the genre as a whole, though there have been a number of ominous signs in last couple years.
Back in May, streaming viewership surpassed that of broadcast and cable television for the first time. Last year, late-night shows brought in $220 million in ad revenue — a 50% drop from the $439 million they earned in 2018. When this year’s Emmy nominations were announced earlier in the week, the Outstanding Talk Series category only had three nominees — Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel Live! and The Daily Show — due to the category’s small number of submissions. When Taylor Tomlinson stepped down as the host of After Midnight in March, CBS decided to cancel the show entirely instead of replacing her. Last June, NBC announced it was cutting the house band on Late Night With Seth Meyers as a cost-saving measure. That same year, it cut The Tonight Show down to four episodes a week instead of the five it had been producing for decades.
In other words, yes, things are looking pretty bleak for late-night talk shows in general. But pulling the plug on the most popular late-night show, one that’s been on the air for 10 years, is crossing the abyss. In Letterman’s era, networks were champing at the bit to get their own late-night programming, so much so that they’d poach a host from a rival network. Nowadays, the genre is in danger. Should Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers start dusting off their resumes?
There has been much speculation that Colbert’s cancellation may have been related to his recent comments about the $16 million settlement between Donald Trump and Paramount Global, CBS’s parent company. On Monday’s show, Colbert called the settlement — which some Democrats have criticized as a quid pro quo to get the Trump administration to approve a multi-billion-dollar merger between Paramount and Skydance Media — “a big fat bribe.” On Friday, the Writers Guild of America even called for a formal investigation into CBS’s decision to determine whether Colbert and his writers were “censored due to their views or the whims of the President.”
If that were the case, why would CBS throw the baby out with the bathwater? If they really felt that Colbert was a threat to their big pending payday, couldn’t they simply fire him and find a new Late Show host? Late-night TV has a long history of hosts biting the hand that feeds them; think about how many jokes Conan O’Brien made about NBC during the 2010 Tonight Show debacle. This move isn’t simply a corporation trying to shut up Colbert — it’s a network making a conscious choice to move away from late-night programming as a whole because they no longer see it as a money-making prospect. Even if politics are at play here, CBS won’t replace Colbert because they know the genre is on its last legs.
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