Why ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ Is Over

At the start of Thursday night’s episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, the veteran talk show host announced that on Wednesday, his bosses at CBS informed him that Late Show would be coming to an end next May. As the studio audience booed at great length and volume, Colbert acknowledged, “Yeah, I share your feelings.” Then he inspired additional sympathetic boos by adding, “It’s not just the end of our show, but it’s the end of The Late Show on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.”

There are two layers to what happened here, and to what Colbert said. One is about the broader challenge of being a late-night broadcast network TV talk show in the year 2025, and why the decision to end Late Show as a franchise, and not just Colbert’s version of it, feels like it will be followed in the not too distant future with his peers at The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon, Late Night With Seth Meyers, and Jimmy Kimmel Live! The other is about the reason the Late Show specifically is being shut down now, which reflects an entirely different reason it’s tough to be doing this kind of show at this fraught moment in history. 

The CBS press release announcing the decision had very big “my ‘We didn’t cancel Late Show because of President Trump’ T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” energy. The first paragraph of the release reads, “We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable and will retire ‘THE LATE SHOW’ franchise at that time.” But then the second paragraph insists, “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.” These two ideas aren’t in complete opposition to one another, but they’re nonetheless getting very different ideas across, as if the people tasked with putting lipstick on this particular pig couldn’t decide which approach was better — or, at least, which was less bad than the other — threw up their hands and tried both. Pointedly, there is no comment from Colbert in the release, and there’s no way he wasn’t asked to provide a polite quote. 

There are, you may have heard a lot of “other matters happening at Paramount” at the moment. The company has been in the process of being sold for what feels like forever. A specific merger with Skydance Media was proposed last year, and is still awaiting approval by the Federal Communications Commission — an agency whose chief reports to the man who lives at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and who earlier this month received a $16 million settlement in a lawsuit he filed against CBS regarding a 60 Minutes episode. Colbert has been one of the most vocal critics of the current administration of anyone on television. It requires precious little imagination to see the cancellation of Late Show — a decision that its host was blatantly displeased with — as a quid pro quo to get the FCC to approve the merger. 

If so, it wouldn’t be the first time a media company has bent the knee to the president since the most recent election — we’re only a few months out from 60 Minutes showrunner Bill Owens resigning, claiming he no longer had the ability “to make independent decisions based on what was right for ’60 Minutes,’ right for the audience,” which was followed a month later by the resignation of CBS News boss Wendy McMahon for similar reasons — nor will it be the last. At Comedy Central, Colbert rose to prominence playing a slightly exaggerated version of Bill O’Reilly and other unapologetically mendacious Fox News pundits from the George W. Bush years. The world in general and the media business in particular have changed so much in the 20 years since the debut of The Colbert Report that much of what he did back in those days now plays as exceedingly gentle — if not wildly optimistic — parody. If one of Colbert’s writers pitched him an idea in those days about a network canceling a TV show specifically because it displeased the Commander in Chief, he probably would have asked that writer to go back and try to add some nuance to the idea. In this era where no one fears saying the quiet part out loud, satire feels increasingly difficult.  

Which brings us to the issue that would have endangered The Late Show at some point in the next few years, regardless of who was in the Oval Office. Many aspects of the TV business are relics of a way that very few people still consume media. Late-night talk shows are just one of the more blatant examples of that. The Tonight Show was created in an era where there were only three national networks, and no cable, let alone streaming, video games, TikTok, or many other challengers for our eyeballs. You might watch a particular late-night show because you loved Johnny Carson, or Conan O’Brien. Or you might just stumble across Drew Barrymore flashing David Letterman while you were channel surfing. If those hosts didn’t have captive audiences, they had close to it, and they attracted viewers from every walk of life and every demographic. If Carson told a joke about Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter, it wasn’t instantly going to be attacked by that president’s supporters for being too harsh, let alone by the POTUS himself. These shows were spaces where everyone could come at the end of a long day and feel like they were part of something larger than themselves — and be happy about that. 

Now, everyone’s attention is in six directions at once. Few people want to watch a topical show that’s not aligned with their preexisting political beliefs. And on the occasions when one of these old warhorses does an interview or comedy segment that strikes a chord with a lot of people, it’s inevitably because people passed around the YouTube clip the following morning. (This was a running plot thread in the most recent season of the Emmy-winning comedy Hacks, where fictional comedian Deborah Vance finally got to host one of these shows and struggled to get people to actually watch it when it aired, rather than waiting for viral clips the next day.) Celebrities can now promote projects directly to their fans through social media, cutting out the talk show middle man. (Or, if they prefer, they can go on less traditional shows like Hot Ones.) 

There’s a lot of excellent work still being done on these shows, and being done by Stephen Colbert. If his material wasn’t hitting its mark, he would probably still have a job a year from now, but the decision would eventually be made for other reasons. It’s telling that CBS made clear right away that it will not seek to install someone else in the Ed Sullivan Theater after Colbert is done. Part of that is an attempt to make this firing seem like anything but what it so obviously is. But part is because there doesn’t seem to be much point in devoting time, money, and other resources trying to launch another show like this. Conan’s TBS talk show ended in 2021. When James Corden left The Late Late Show in 2023, CBS didn’t opt to hire a new host, and instead went with a different format in Taylor Tomlinson’s After Midnight — and when that ended last month, CBS didn’t even bother trying to arrange a new late-night show of any kind to succeed it. 

Some of these series continue as much out of inertia as for the value they provide their respective companies. Now that CBS has shuttered its talk-show apparatus altogether, it’s going to be easier for NBC and ABC executives to look at their own and question whether they still need to keep making them. Maybe the next one to go will happen when one of the hosts’ contracts is up, or if Meyers or Kimmel simply decide they’ve had enough of the nightly grind. It might take a while, but this very much feels like the beginning of the end for this format that has been around practically since television has existed as a mass medium. 

During that understandably prickly opening from Colbert, he talked about the decision to end the show altogether, lamenting the 200 crew members who would be out of a job, as well as the opportunity being denied someone else to try to make Late Show his or her own in the same way Colbert did after Letterman retired, or that Conan did after Letterman changed networks. 

“I wish somebody else was getting it,” he said. Nobody is. Not at CBS, and possibly not anywhere on the not-so-Big Three.