Colbert’s Cancellation Puts Late-Night TV in Apocalypse Mode

Thursday’s episode of CBS’s The Late Show with Stephen Colbert opened with the host turning in his desk chair and appearing startled to see viewers he’s been entertaining for the past decade: “Oh hey, everybody,” he greeted them, with the kind of self-conscious folksiness that has defined his post-Colbert Report persona. But the bit prefaced a bombshell. Colbert revealed that he’d just been told that his show would end in May 2026. A chorus of boos reverberated through the studio audience. Colbert matched their energy: “Yeah, I share your feelings!” Moreover, the host explained, “It’s the end of The Late Show on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.” Running down a list of thank-yous, he sounded both mournful and characteristically magnanimous: “It is a fantastic job. I wish somebody else was getting it.”

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

By the time the announcement aired, the news had been ricocheting around the media for hours, the rare entertainment story that merited push notifications from major publications and timely reactions from high-profile politicians. One of the latter was Elizabeth Warren, who fired off a scorching social media post. “CBS canceled Colbert’s show just THREE DAYS after Colbert called out CBS parent company Paramount for its $16M settlement with Trump—a deal that looks like bribery,” the senator wrote. “America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.” The timing of The Late Show’s demise is indeed concerning, and if the lawsuit did influence the network’s decision to can Colbert—a perennial Trump critic—the implications for free speech in cultural commentary as well as in comedy are nothing short of terrifying. Still, as that story develops, it’s also worth acknowledging what we know for sure: The end of The Late Show is the biggest nail yet in the coffin of a dying late-night talk show format.

Senator Warren is hardly alone in making the connection between Colbert’s firing and Paramount’s settlement with the President. To summarize the facts behind the furor: On July 1, Paramount Global agreed to pay $16 million to settle Trump’s lawsuit alleging that CBS’s flagship news magazine 60 Minutes edited an October 2024 interview with then-VP and presidential candidate Kamala Harris with the aim of persuading viewers to vote for her. Because the suit was widely seen as baseless, with legal experts and Paramount itself lining up to insist it had no merit, the news of the network’s capitulation sent shockwaves through the media. As First Amendment expert Amy Kristin Sanders told TIME earlier this month: “CBS selected clips from the interview that they thought would be the best to inform their audience—a very common journalistic practice… It’s been recognized by the Supreme Court as the process of editorial discretion or editorial decision making and it’s protected by the First Amendment.”

It didn’t escape widespread notice, either, that Paramount’s concession coincided with the company’s merger with David Ellison’s Skydance Media, for which it will need the federal government’s approval. This was the aspect of the settlement that seemed to most offend Colbert, who returned from a summer hiatus on Monday with some strong words in criticism of what he described as Trump’s “nuisance lawsuit”: “As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I am offended. And I don’t know if anything will ever repair my trust in this company—but just taking a stab at it, I’d say $16 million would help,” the host quipped at the top of his monologue. “I believe that this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles—it’s big fat bribe.”

To hear Paramount and CBS execs tell it, Colbert’s speech had nothing to do with The Late Show’s cancellation. “This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” they maintained. “It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” For his part, commenting on Truth Social Friday morning, the President further inserted himself in the narrative. “I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” Trump wrote. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert!” 

Regardless of what the full story might be—and of any disagreement one might have with POTUS’s estimation of Colbert or skepticism one might harbor that he possesses inside knowledge of Kimmel’s fate—both statements capture the ominous outlook for late night in general. Network late-night shows have been in ratings freefall for years now, with culprits ranging from the rise of streaming to the supremacy of social video platforms among the young adults who could once be counted on to tune in at midnight to the long pandemic hiatuses and subsequent socially distanced lockdown comebacks that broke many viewers of a nightly habit.

This shift has manifested, over the last few years, in broadcasters cutting corners, from NBC snipping the Friday installment of Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show to CBS scrapping The Late Late Show after the departure of James “Carpool Karaoke” Corden. It has also led to conservative decision-making in the late-night realm; as nice as it has been to see Jon Stewart back on The Daily Show every Monday, his return was basically a tacit admission that the onetime cultural juggernaut could not survive without him. And it has accelerated despite such experiments in cultivating Gen Z audiences as NBC’s A Little Late with Lilly Singh, whose host made her name on YouTube, and CBS’s own Late Late Show replacement After Midnight, helmed by 31-year-old comedian Taylor Tomlinson—both canceled after less than two years on the air. 

The thing is, as many commentators have already pointed out, by the diminished standards of network late night in 2025, Colbert is having a good year. He’s beating his broadcast competitors, Kimmel and Fallon, in the ratings. Just this week, The Late Show scored yet another Emmy nomination (even as the TV Academy snubbed late night’s most promising debut in ages: Netflix’s Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney). At a moment when late-night programs’ presence on the internet is considered a crucial indicator of their brand value and cultural impact, it boasts nearly 10 million YouTube subscribers and has recently gone viral on TikTok with interviews of such Gen-Z-relevant figures as Zohran Mamdani (3.9 million views) and Megan Stalter (1.8 million views). Not that Colbert, despite his vocal opposition to Trump, is some kind of outspoken lefty. When Mamdani appeared alongside his also-progressive opponent-slash-ally, Brad Lander, in advance of June’s New York City mayoral primary, Colbert hastened to clarify: “I am not endorsing either one of you.” Then he grilled Mamdani with centrist criticisms of the candidate’s embrace of democratic socialism and support for Palestinians. 

All of which is to say that, within the realm of broadcast late night, Colbert is an outlier only insofar as he’s doing better than the competition. And yet The Late Show—which has been airing for nearly 32 years, originally under the envelope-pushingly weird leadership of David Letterman—is the first of the three big network late-night dynasties to be canceled. When it goes dark next May, only Kimmel and Fallon will remain in the 11:35 timeslot. Even if you’re convinced that Trump’s preferences are weighing on every entertainment exec’s every programming choice, don’t be surprised if 2016’s hair-ruffle heard ‘round the world doesn’t save Fallon, who has been trending at the bottom of the heap with roughly half as many viewers as Colbert. Whatever sealed The Late Show’s fate, the result is an acceleration of late night’s demise from slow decline to full-on apocalypse mode.  

Because for a company of Paramount’s or NBCUniversal’s or ABC parent Disney’s size and  vulnerability—given an ailing entertainment industry—every decision is ultimately financial. That would certainly include any decision based on the “challenging backdrop in late night” (I assume that since the statement explicitly disputes that “the show’s performance” and “content” played any role, this vague turn of phrase refers to the expense of making The Late Show, the outlook for future seasons, or both). It would also include any decision made in hopes of appeasing the Trump administration. What is the Skydance merger, after all, but a financial arrangement aimed at improving Paramount’s financial prospects? None of these factors are mutually exclusive. Nor would a “purely financial” choice to end The Late Show, thereby eliminating one of vanishingly few outlets for political commentary, make its cancellation any less destructive to the discourse.

The bottom line is: If it can happen to Stephen Colbert, it can happen to anyone—and might well happen to everyone, with effects that are sure to extend beyond the realm of TV comedy.