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“‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,’ the most-watched late-night program on U.S. broadcast television and a frequent platform of satire aimed at President Donald Trump, will end its 10-year run on CBS in May 2026, the network said on Thursday. The show will be retired and Colbert will not be replaced…
“‘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,’ CBS executives said… This month, Paramount agreed to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump over an interview with his former Democratic challenger, Kamala Harris, that CBS's ‘60 Minutes’ broadcast in October.” Reuters
The left praises Colbert, and accuses CBS of canceling his show to placate Trump.
“The real story starts with an $8 billion merger, a right-wing billionaire, and a president who just successfully shook down CBS for $16 million. The Late Show isn’t dying because people stopped watching late-night TV. It’s being murdered because Stephen Colbert spent the last decade being one of Trump’s most persistent critics on network television, and the billionaires about to take over CBS need Trump’s approval for their merger.”
Parker Molloy, New Republic
“It hardly escaped anyone’s notice that The Late Show’s cancellation had happened the same week that Colbert spent three minutes of his show picking apart Paramount’s refusal to defend CBS, in court, from Trump’s ridiculous lawsuit against 60 Minutes. Nor was it all that believable that Colbert’s bosses would suddenly drop one of their biggest and most beloved celebrities without some more unseemly objectives in mind…
“Colbert bravely called out President George W. Bush to his face at the 2006 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, ran a brief presidential campaign, testified to Congress on behalf of immigrant farmworkers, made a personal enemy of Trump with his Late Show commentary, and even confronted, on air, the sexual assault allegations leveled against former CBS chief Les Moonves…
“It was that honesty and frankness, combined with his biting touch, that made Stephen Colbert such a TV icon.”
Nitish Pahwa, Slate
“The Late Show has been the most-watched late-night program for nearly a decade. If the financial outlook is as grim as CBS wants us to believe it is, the network could have simply cut costs, much like NBC did by scaling back The Tonight Show to four episodes a week and eliminating the Late Night band. These are the painful but considered steps a company takes when it isn’t merely capitulating to an administration hellbent on vengeance.”
Meredith Blake, The Contrarian
“Viewers still want political content, but they are not provided with it as they were in Mr. Trump’s first term. #Resistance was good business. The ‘Trump bump’ was real, shoring up legacy newspapers and cable news and seeding an entire universe of progressive news sites and influencers. Did it make a difference? In 2024, not enough, since Mr. Trump was still re-elected…
“And this time around, as he has done with everything else that once stood in his way, from Harvard to fancy law firms to the Federal Reserve, he is determined to crush any dissent using any tools he has available. So just the mere possibility of a holdup on a media deal, which could undermine the vast wealth of a media heiress, seems as if it could be enough to end an impertinent TV show.”
Molly Jong-Fast, New York Times
The right is critical of Colbert, and argues that the show was cancelled for financial reasons.
The right is critical of Colbert, and argues that the show was cancelled for financial reasons.
“At one time, comics and talk show hosts sought the broadest possible audience. Johnny Carson was the prototype, and the most successful exemplar, of the host who was liked by just about everyone. Carson’s show was essentially apolitical. He made political jokes, but they were equally divided between the parties… Colbert’s show, conversely, was about nothing but politics. It was aimed at the fraction of the population that can’t get enough leftism. In the end, that wasn’t a big enough audience to stay in business.”
John Hinderaker, Power Line Blog
“The ending of the show is a reflection of the fact that CBS was losing $40 million each year on the show… And as much fun as it would be to blame Colbert for being greedy and making the show unprofitable with his $20 million per year salary, with numbers like that, the show would still be unprofitable even if he worked for free…
“Reuters adds, ‘the show’s ad revenue plummeted to $70.2 million last year from $121.1 million in 2018, according to ad tracking firm Guideline.’ If a show’s ad revenue gets nearly cut in half over a six-year period, that is a serious and worsening problem… The end of the show is primarily a reflection that viewers’ habits have changed, not as many people watch late-night network television as a few years ago, and there’s no sign that the trend will reverse.”
Jim Geraghty, National Review
“The news here isn’t Mr. Colbert’s firing but rather the mothballing of the Late Show itself… Political content with a splash of comedy isn’t exiting the stage; it retains a narrow but deep audience. That’s why ‘Gutfeld!,’ the Fox evening show that also doesn’t attempt to persuade or entertain beyond its core audience, has a significantly larger viewership than the Late Show. But it does so on cable, not pretending to be a part of a broadcast common culture…
“The Constitution requires a certain amount of unity, at least a minimal shared conception of the common good. The monoculture of the 20th century was by no means robust enough for what the Founders thought we must share, but as it fades to black and we’re increasingly siloed by algorithms and the digitization of daily life, it’s important to understand together that we’ll likely never again have a shared mass culture to unite us…
“America depends on a shared sense of ‘we.’ Boomers and Gen X once found some of that on late-night TV. For millennials and Gen Z, a fragmented media ecosystem that’s insufficiently popular to sustain a common culture presents real challenges. Any revolution would not be televised—it would be streamed from a thousand angles across a million platforms. The task of rebuilding a shared Constitutional civics thus has never been more urgent.”
Ben Sasse, Wall Street Journal
