Stephen Colbert is out at CBS. Is all of late-night TV officially doomed?

USA Today

2 days ago

This certainly isn't the future that Stephen Colbert had in mind for himself.
The host of CBS' "Late Show with Stephen Colbert" announced on July 17 that he only has one year left of monologues from New York's Ed Sullivan Theater. And it's not just him who's leaving.
"This is all just going away," the comedian, 61, told his appalled audience, explaining that he's not being replaced, but the show will air its final episode in May 2026. "Next year will be our last season. The network will be ending 'The Late Show.'"
The news sent shockwaves through the entertainment industry, which has accepted late-night TV shows like "Late Show" and NBC's "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" as an immutable fact, not an optional part of the network lineup. The idea that a series as long-running and culturally ingrained as "Late Show," an institution on the network since David Letterman defected from NBC to create it in 1993, could simply go away is as unfathomable as the idea of CBS itself going away.
Or is it? It's 2025, not 1993, and late-night TV is becoming more expensive and less profitable every year, as ratings sink and costs go up. YouTube clips may be viral, but they don't make up for the revenue lost as live viewership declines. It was always a question of when – not if – late-night TV would cease to exist in its traditional form. But nobody expected it to happen quite so soon.
This is the end of an era, a moment in Hollywood history that will be remembered: There was the time before Colbert was canceled and after. And it remains to be seen if any of his remaining late-night compatriots – Jimmys Fallon and Kimmel, Seth Meyers and Jon Stewart – will survive on the air in the years to come.
Why is CBS canceling 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert'?
After Colbert's jaw-dropping on-air announcement, viewers had only one question: Why? If you ask CBS' parent company, Paramount, it's simply about the math.
"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," Paramount and CBS executives says. "We are proud that Stephen called CBS home. He and the broadcast will be remembered in the pantheon of greats that graced late-night television."
"Other matters happening at Paramount" is the operative phrase in the statement, an oblique reference to the company's current efforts to finalize an $8.4 billion merger with Skydance Media, which requires regulatory approval from the federal government. And Colbert is an outspoken critic of President Trump's administration. Hardly a night goes by in which Colbert doesn't use his "Late Show" stage to poke at the president.
And even his own parent company is not immune from Colbert's ire. Just three days before he revealed the cancellation news, Colbert used his bully pulpit to sharply criticize Paramount for what he saw as capitulating to Trump, after CBS News settled a defamation lawsuit with the president for $16 million. Colbert called it a "big fat bribe," an effort to smooth the way for the Skydance merger.
"As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I am offended,' he said. '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.'
Paramount also owns Comedy Central, which airs the equally anti-Trump "Daily Show" with Jon Stewart and other comedians. The company hasn't said anything lately about the future of that political late-night series, which (along with "Late Show" and "Jimmy Kimmel Live") just received a 2025 Emmy nomination for best talk series.
The CEO of Paramount's hopeful new owner Skydance is David Ellison, who happens to be the son of Larry Ellison, the billionaire chairman of Oracle who has hosted a fundraiser for President Trump on his property and donated to Republican-friendly super-PACs.
Is this the end of late night TV as we know it?
Critics and analysts are furiously debating whether the "Late Show" cancellation was truly a financial move or more politically motivated, but whatever the ultimate truth, it doesn't affect the trajectory of the late-night genre: Colbert will be gone in 10 months, and the other dominoes could start to fall.
CBS recently ended its 12:30 a.m. series, comedy panel show "After Midnight," after just over a year, when host Taylor Tomlinson decided to leave in favor of her standup career. NBC's "Late Night with Seth Meyers" recently axed its live, in-studio band as a cost-cutting measure. "Tonight Show" went from five nights a week to four in 2024, joining the other late-night shows. ABC's Jimmy Kimmel routinely threatens to leave the grind of late-night behind. Conan O'Brien, who briefly inherited the "Tonight Show" throne, has moved from decades of traditional late night TV on NBC and later TBS to the low-fi world of podcasting. Samantha Bee's TBS talk show was also canceled.
We are far from the days of Johnny Carson as America's father figure lulling us to sleep each night, or even of Letterman and Jay Leno trading barbs and competing for millions of viewers at 11:35 p.m. There was a time when late-night TV was our pop-culture North Star, and the hosts were tastemakers and star-makers. Now the genre is well known as a a difficult financial sell and viewed mostly by older viewers who are less appealing to advertisers. YouTube clips can garner a few hundred thousand views, sure, but even the one-time viral video king Fallon doesn't get tens of millions of hits anymore. Generation Z and millennials are increasingly turning to short-form video platforms like TikTok. The monologue, two guests and a band format is stilted, unyielding and increasingly a marker of the past.
If Colbert can't survive this landscape, it's not clear if anyone can. According to LateNighter.com, citing Nielsen ratings, "Late Show" was leading the pack in ratings so far in 2025. The show wins the 11:35 pm hour with an average of 2.417 million viewers for the three months ended in June. Kimmel and Fallon were far behind in that metric, averaging 1.77 million and 1.19 million, respectively, although Kimmel is replaced by guest hosts during the summer.
What's next for Stephen Colbert?
Colbert rose to fame on "The Daily Show" in the 2000s, playing a right-wing conservative character as satire that he kept going on spinoff "The Colbert Report" for nearly a decade, from 2005-14. He took over "Late Show" in 2015 after Letterman's retirement from the program in a much ballyhooed transition that coincided with other shifts in late night, including Fallon's 2014 takeover "Tonight" from Jay Leno.
With a different pair of eyeglasses and stripped of his faux persona, the world met the real Colbert for the first time, and he quickly developed a comfortable routine. Political punchlines dominated his nightly monologues, with openly anti-Trump sentiments for the duration of the president's first term and the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections. His standup is followed by the traditional easygoing celebrity interviews and musical performances. With his political-comedy chops, Colbert hosted more politicians, newscasters and thinkers than Fallon ever has on his gimmick-and-game-happy "Tonight." On July 17, Colbert welcomed Senator Adam Schiff, the California Democrat. But in spite of his penchant for political barbs, many of Colbert's segments are surprisingly soft and heartfelt, whether he's nerding out over "The Lord of the Rings," "Severance" and "Star Wars" or sharing the stage with wife Evelyn in one of her frequent cameos.
There ware no indicators that Colbert was ready to slow down on "Late Show." His appearances are routinely energetic and whip-smart; no fatigue has crept into his comedy, and there was no reason to believe that he couldn't have keep doing "Late Show" for another decade.
Of course, CBS had other ideas. Now he's soon to be a comedian without a stage, the town crier without a box on which to stand and shout. But it's unlikely he'll remain idle after he takes his final bow. His options are likely to be multifold, from podcasting like O'Brien to a streaming or cable series like Stewart or Letterman, although streamers have not yet successfully cracked the talk-show format, and anything with Colbert will likely come with a hefty salary. His former "Daily Show" colleague John Oliver has found great success on HBO with Emmy-winning "Last Week Tonight." Or Colbert could come up with something all his own. Nobody had done anything like "Report" before he tried it.
But Colbert isn't making any plans yet, at least not publicly. He's still mourning what he's about to lose.
"I'm so grateful (to CBS) for giving me this chair," he told viewers. "It is a fantastic job. I wish somebody else else was getting it. It's a job I'm looking forward to doing with this usual gang of idiots for another 10 months. It's going to be fun. Y'all ready?"
Ready or not, the next 10 months will usher in a new era in TV. But hopefully we won't stop hearing Colbert's opinions about it and everything else. His voice is too funny, too smart and too important to go quietly into the night.