NEW YORK, NY – Several days after “The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert claimed CBS parent company Paramount succumbed to President Donald Trump with a “big, fat bribe” over litigation stemming from a deceptively edited Kamala Harris interview in 2024, the late night host announced that CBS was cancelling the long-running show.
While speculation looms over whether Colbert’s harsh criticism of Paramount contributed to the decision, CBS claims the decision to end the show was simply a financial one.
On July 17th, “The Late Show” host announced to his live audience – seemingly as the filming of the episode appeared over – that he needed to reshoot the cold open for the show.
As live audience members expected some sort of surprise or gimmick for the reshoot, they instead were hit with the news that CBS was pulling the plug on the program.
Colbert told the audience, “Next year will be our last season. The network will be ending The Late Show in May…It's not just the end of our show, but it's the end of the Late Show on CBS.”
Following the announcement, speculation spread as to whether Paramount was putting an end to the show due to Colbert’s criticism of a recent settlement reached between CBS’ parent company and President Trump.
Paramount recently agreed to pay President Trump a $16 million settlement following a suit filed by the president over a “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Harris, which President Trump claimed was deceptively edited and misled would-be voters.
Three days prior to Colbert announcing the end of the program, he lambasted his employer on his show, calling the move to settle with President Trump a “big, fat, bribe,” explicitly citing the Skydance merger.
Colbert’s comments made on July 14th are also related to another theory fans are speculating as to why “The Late Show” is being cancelled.
Rather than pointing directly to Colbert’s commentary itself, questions loom as to whether ending the program is a sort of de facto concession to the Trump administration in an effort to expedite the Paramount/Skydance merger.
However, Paramount has explicitly stated that the sole motivation to end “The Late Show” was a “financial decision,” thereby implying the program and its bloated budget is simply not getting the return on investment it did in decades past.
Despite Colbert still holding second place in the late night TV landscape with 2.4 million viewers (behind Greg Gutfeld’s 3.2 million), the era of broadcast television being the biggest draw to advertisers is largely over.
For roughly six years, YouTube has been the king of attracting paying advertisers, garnering $15 billion in ad spend in 2019 compared to CBS’ $6 billion that same year. And the margin of ad spend between broadcast television and digital media is only widening in the digital media landscape’s favor, thus leaving corporate media relics like Colbert in the proverbial dust.
