CBS Killed ‘The Late Show,’ But Late Night Is Dying Of Old Age
Chris Black, GQ, 7/24/25
Something has shifted in the last decade. People online and off are forgetting that giant corporations are not people with good instincts, empathy, or emotional intelligence. They are ruthless behemoth machines that live and die by the bottom line; they don’t care about you or your well-being. They care about taking your money and your attention.
On Thursday, CBS announced that “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” will end in May 2026, a move the network described in a statement as “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.” Outrage ensued, and some of it is worth examination. Media juggernaut Paramount (which owns CBS) recently settled a lawsuit for $16 million regarding an interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris that aired on 60 Minutes about a month before the 2024 election. Trump claimed that the interview was edited to “tip the scales in favor of the Democratic party.” It’s all ridiculous and petty, but it sets a scary precedent.
Half of Colbert’s job was to use his clean-cut Southern Eddie Haskell vibe to talk shit on the President, but when the President is deeply litigious and the network has to write big checks, defending a late-night show host’s clever shit-talking seems less appealing. It can’t have helped that, before the cancellation, Colbert described the settlement on his show as a “big fat bribe” handed to the Trump regime by Paramount, which is seeking FCC approval for an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media—which makes this, maybe, a “mock the behemoths and find out” situation.
With all of that being said, Colbert’s show was losing $40 million a year. That’s a staggering sum, but it’s also not really Colbert’s fault; viewership for late-night television, a fixture of the American entertainment landscape since the 1950s, has fallen off a cliff. Young people are on TikTok dancing or watching Hasan Piker and his Tabi loafers stream on Twitch. You can get news and takes on popular culture anywhere you look. Losing $40 million a year on shows that mostly exist to generate clips for social media is not a good business practice. The era of four different major television networks each hosting a guy in a suit doing an eight-minute monologue at 11:30 is simply over. I can watch a three-minute clip of Hunter Biden talking about his love for crack on Channel 5 or see Presidential candidates talk to comedians in a makeshift studio. Why would I spend my free time watching Jimmy Kimmel tell another joke about Matt Damon? How could we expect these old dogs to learn new tricks?
Late-night talk shows used to be comedically edgy, offering a platform for musical acts and giving stars a place to sit on a couch and tell pre-planned stories they had rehearsed with a producer and their PR team. It was an entertainment medium, but it was also a mechanism for getting asses in seats on opening weekend. That system has been upended and replaced; the celebrities who used to sustain the talk-show ecosystem five nights a week are busy promoting their new projects by eating hot wings, going on dates to a London chicken shop, or sitting down in a soothingly lit podcast studio to spill their guts. All of these options garner more eyeballs than linear TV could ever hope to attract in 2025. Late night as we know it is a monument to the comforting familiarity of an American monoculture that no longer exists. Colbert can still make waves by tweaking his soon-to-be-former bosses, but the late-night-talk-show format as a whole is tired. CBS did what it had to do to stop some of the bleeding; the timing and optics were awful, but TV is a business, at the end of the day.