Cancellation will have effect in May 2026
CBS will end the program “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” next year and will apparently completely abandon the night television business.
The network, invoking financial difficulties, stated that the cancellation will have an effect in May 2026, the normal end of the television season.
The decision is particularly surprising because “The Late Show” is usually the biggest audience program of the night. And the timing is likely to raise questions because it just comes two weeks after CBS’s parent company, Paramount, resolved a lawsuit filed by President Trump against CBS News.
The agreement – and the pending merger of Paramount with Skydance Media – stimulated speculation about Colbert’s future at CBS. Colbert, after all, is one of Trump’s most fierce critical television.
Colbert alluded to online concern about his destination when he returned on vacation on Monday night. He condemned Paramount’s agreement in the air, comparing him to a “fat bribe”, and joked that his new mustache would protect him from the corporation: “Okay, okay, but how will they press Stephen Colbert … if they can’t find him?”
CBS, however, said in a statement that “this is a purely financial decision against a challenging scenario at Late Night. It is not in any way related to the performance of the program, its content or other matters that are happening in Paramount.”
The company’s financial pressures are real; Paramount said goodbye more 3.5 percent of its workforce last month.
Due to the drop in advertising revenues, The Late Show is no longer profitable, according to a source close to the network.
Still, Colbert’s news turned his head in the TV world, as evidenced by the heart -heart reactions of the program’s Instagram page. One of the most popular comments said “this is crazy.”
Colbert shared the news during his program recording on Thursday night. He did not give any indication that the decision was his own; On the contrary, he said he learned of the decision of the network “last night.”
“Next year will be our last season,” Colbert said while hearing audible “boos” at the studio’s audience. “The station will end our program in May,” he said. “It’s the end of ‘The Late Show’ at CBS,” he added, continuing, “All this is disappearing.”
Some observers immediately raised concerns about Paramount’s motivation, including Democratic Senator Adam Schiff, who happened to be Colbert’s guest on Thursday.
“I just recorded with Stephen Colbert, who announced that his program was canceled,” Schiff wrote on X. “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves more.”
“I want to say that CBS people have been great partners,” said Colbert. “I am very grateful to the Tiffany network for giving me this chair and this beautiful theater to which I get it home. And of course, I’m grateful to you, the audience, who joined us every night here, outside, around the world.”
End of an era
The franchise “The Late Show” has been a cornerstone of CBS programming for over thirty years.
Founding presenter David Letterman turned the program into a brand adored in the 1990s with his Top Ten and Stupid Human Tricks lists. In 2015, he spent the testimony to Colbert, who further promoted the schedule with his state -of -the -art political humor.
Colbert had a long history with the company now known as Paramount: he had a famous passage on The Daily Show, on the company’s Central Comedy Cabo Cabo, as a writer and correspondent, and then launched a satirical spinoff titled “The Colbert Report.”
Trump’s election in 2016 changed the trajectory of Colbert’s version of The Late Show. Colbert stood out from the Late Night group when his harsh criticism of Trump galvanized viewers, giving CBS his biggest Late Night audience victory in two decades.
Colbert remained a vocal and excited critic during Trump’s second term, even when his mother company tried to reach an agreement to end Trump’s lawsuit against CBS News, which legal experts said they had not been merit from the beginning.
The end of Colbert’s program will certainly raise concerns about his friend and colleague producer Jon Stewart, who features a weekly edition of The Daily Show.
CNN contacted the representatives of Stewart and Letterman to comment on the matter.
In the announcement he made on Thursday, Colbert referred to the fact that the program is ending instead of remaining a powerful diffusion platform for the comics. “I had given me someone else to receive him,” he said.
The network had already finished James Corden’s Late Late Show in 2023. At the time, the executives said the 12:35 show was not profitable for CBS.
Colbert helped produce a much less expensive replacement program, “After Midnight.” This program ended earlier this year, but CBS said it was canceled because host Taylor Tomlinson did not want to run another season, not for financial reasons.
Bill Carter, author of two bestselling books about dawn wars, said on Thursday night that “the financial side of this business is definitely under pressure.”
“But if CBS believes it can escape without some serious questions about surrendering Trump, they are seriously deluded,” Carter said.
