When CBS announced in July 2025 that it would pull the plug on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" come May 2026, the news sent shockwaves through the television industry and late-night comedy fans alike. The show, which had maintained its status as the most-watched program in its genre with an average of 2.4 million viewers, seemed untouchable—at least on the surface. But behind the scenes, a perfect storm of shifting viewer habits, network economics, and even political intrigue had been brewing for years, threatening not just Colbert’s tenure but the very future of late-night TV as we know it.
Jimmy Kimmel, Colbert's fellow late-night host, wasted no time in challenging the official narrative. According to Variety, Kimmel called reports that "The Late Show" was hemorrhaging $40 million a year "beyond nonsensical." He explained, “These alleged insiders analyzing budgets don’t know what they’re talking about.” Kimmel pointed out that most analyses focus solely on advertising revenue, overlooking the massive sums generated through affiliate fees. “Affiliate fees, or carriage fees, generate hundreds of millions of dollars—probably in total billions—from stations around the country,” he said. In his view, there was "just not a snowball’s chance in hell" that the show was losing money as reported.
Kimmel’s defense didn’t stop there. As reported by Paste Magazine, he argued that while network television as a whole may be declining, late-night TV is thriving on streaming platforms and social media. He insisted that CBS’s decision to cancel Colbert’s show was not, as the network claimed, a purely financial one. In a gesture of solidarity, Kimmel even announced his intention to vote for Colbert to win the Emmy for Outstanding Talk Series, framing it as a supportive move in the wake of the show’s cancellation.
Yet, the financial debate is only one piece of a much larger puzzle. Bill Scheft, who spent 24 years writing for David Letterman’s late-night shows, told Newsday that the timing of the cancellation was “greasy”—not exactly a surprise, but still unsettling. He noted that the traditional way people "watched late-night TV" had eroded. Instead of staying up for a full hour of monologues and celebrity chats, millions now catch the highlights on YouTube or TikTok, or skip the genre altogether. “Something had to give,” Scheft remarked, still trying to process how the most-viewed late-night show could be the one to go.
The numbers back up Scheft’s sense of unease. While "The Late Show" still boasted 2.4 million viewers, that figure was down sharply from 7.3 million just before the pandemic. And even those numbers are squishy—Nielsen ratings include people who watched on DVR or streaming services up to a week later. The networks don’t break out the "live" ratings, and with good reason: the bulk of late-night viewing now happens online, well after midnight.
Industry insiders suggest that the changing economics of television played a decisive role. Jim Bell, a veteran NBC producer who once ran "The Tonight Show," told Newsday, “Anytime you see these mergers and acquisitions there's quite often a clean-up-in-aisle-seven situation when it comes to accounting. You've got something that's hemorrhaging money and you want to tidy that up.” Bell added that even five years ago, the math wasn’t adding up, and there was little evidence that viewer habits would reverse course.
The timing of the cancellation raised more than a few eyebrows. Just 15 days before the announcement, CBS paid $16 million toward Donald Trump’s future presidential library, settling a lawsuit over a "60 Minutes" interview. Then, on August 7, 2025, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, merged with Skydance—a deal that required approval from the Federal Communications Commission, an agency under direct White House control. CBS President George Cheeks insisted at a press conference that the show "just wasn’t sustainable to continue," while David Ellison, the new chairman of Paramount Skydance, told CNBC, “We don’t intend to politicize the company.” Still, the proximity of these events led some observers to wonder whether financial motives were the whole story.
Political pressure or not, the business model for late-night TV has been on shaky ground for years. Salaries for Colbert—reportedly between $15 million and $20 million annually—and his staff of around 200, many protected by union contracts, contributed to the high costs. CBS reportedly claimed the show lost about $40 million a year, a figure that former CBS late-night chief Vincent Favale questioned. Favale told Newsday that if CBS truly wanted to save the show, it could have asked Colbert to take a pay cut or move to a smaller theater. “The audience doesn’t care if it’s in the Ed Sullivan Theater,” Favale said. “It’s shocking that this guy delivered the No. 1 show every night, fought the good fight, and then got canceled.”
Meanwhile, CBS had been trying to sell the Ed Sullivan Theater for at least two years, according to industry observers. The network had already sold off other iconic properties, like CBS Television City in Los Angeles, for $750 million in 2018. But little effort seemed to be made to retain the theater’s chief tenant—another sign that the network was itching to cut costs wherever possible.
The broader context is a late-night landscape that has been shrinking for decades. In the 1970s, "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson" drew 17 million regular viewers—a staggering figure by today’s standards. The genre flourished in the 1990s and 2000s, but the advent of YouTube in 2005 fundamentally changed how audiences engaged with late-night content. As Jay Leno once quipped, “Now you have to be content with half the audience, because you have to give your opinion.” The idea of a "whole audience" is now a relic of the past.
Gerard Mulligan, a longtime writer and on-air regular on Letterman’s shows, lamented the decline. “It’s a sad thing because I don’t know if people really understand the magnitude of Carson and his 17 million people a night. I mean wow, just wow. You can’t imagine how impactful that was, that Johnny would tell a joke one night and the next day we’d all repeat it.”
Bill Scheft echoed that sentiment, saying, “I’m not worried about Stephen—he’s gonna be fine wherever he lands—but it really is sad because I know a lot of people on that show, and I’m really fond of them. They do really good work. And that’s the thing that just stinks.”
As "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" prepares for its final bow, the end of an era feels both inevitable and abrupt. The genre that once united a nation before bedtime now faces an uncertain future, fragmented by technology, economics, and shifting cultural tides. For those who grew up on the magic of late-night TV, it’s a bittersweet farewell to a format that once seemed like it would last forever.
