Culture CBS is ending ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ next year

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/17/media/cbs-cancels-stephen-colbert

https://archive.ph/UAA9U

https://lite.cnn.com/2025/07/17/media/cbs-cancels-stephen-colbert

By Brian Stelter and Dan Heching, CNN
Thu July 17, 2025

In a shocking move, CBS is ending “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” next year, potentially exiting the late-night television business altogether.

The cancellation will take effect in May 2026, the normal end of the broadcast TV season, the network said.

The Thursday night announcement came just two weeks after the parent company of CBS, Paramount, settled a lawsuit lodged by President Trump against CBS News.

The settlement – and Paramount’s pending merger with Skydance Media – spurred speculation about Colbert’s future at CBS. Colbert, after all, is one of the staunchest critics of Trump on television.

CBS, however, said in a statement that “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.”

Colbert shared the news at his show taping on Thursday afternoon.

“Next year will be our last season,” Colbert said as audible ‘boos’ were heard in the live studio audience. “The network will be ending our show in May,” he said. “It’s the end of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS,” he added, going on to say, “This is all just going away.”

This is a developing story. It will be updated.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

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MovieBlob is the only salt mine we really need.

 

[Peaches the Wonder Cat]

Anyone remember the podcast "Strike Force Five" that these late night show hosts did?

I dare you to tell the difference between any of them (except for Oliver with his twit accent.)

 

[Positron]

MovieBlob is the only salt mine we really need.

I only follow Blue Chip lolcows who bring regular dividends.

 

[Not A Bunny]

Skibidi Biden didn't kill his career, though. It's a death of a thousand cuts, meted out over the course of years, and while I don't think this is necessarily going to "kill" his "career" (I'm sure someone, somewhere, will often him a streaming deal, or at least a podcast), it IS a step in the right direction.

(the right direction being killing his career)

Election night 2024 was a reckoning for him and all the guys like him.

They had their little echo chambers of only the "good" people, while all the rest of us quietly went on about our lives and didn't engage - we knew what would happen if we tried - and voted accordingly, having seen what puds like Colbert stood for.

If there were even a thousand cuts, it was that night, when the news anchors were scrambling for the dwindling paths to a Kamala victory, when they were revving up their rote talking points about what a shame about this country, and how awful the people who voted for Trump were, when they realized their little clique was no longer the cool kids' club.
Colbert, if he had any humanity left, could have read the room ages ago. But those of us who saw the inevitable coming, that Biden was a doddering mess and his VP was an epic disaster, paving the way for a Republican slam dunk, weren't going to tell the enemy while he was making a mistake, seeing as how he refused to listen anyhow.

Colbert and all others like him, are tasting irrelevancy, and it's bloody.

 

[Halbschwanz]

The whole Daily Show shtick back then was to present themselves as "concerned centrists" who "called out both sides", all while subtly but noticeably advancing leftwing causes year by year.

I think a lot of so-called "enlightened centrists" are and were that to begin with. That's why I'm not overly weepy about Dubya Jr. era (((counterculture))) politics and its priors being exposed as the subversionary rot it was. Turns out traditions existed for a reason and your crotchety old grandpa who complained about niggers, fags, and people getting soft was correct in his assessments.

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Man, wouldn't they look stupid if they quoted actual viewership numbers? It's a good thing that tweeting from your fart couch fighting fascism doesn't require you to back up a single thing you say!

 

[pussy Kalama]

I remember watching The Colbert Report. The man was never particularly funny. Same thing with John Oliver and Samantha Bee. John Levowitz was also never particularly funny. Hopefully he dies horribly, hopefully of ass cancer.

 

[Soulless4510]

I think a lot of so-called "enlightened centrists" are and were that to begin with. That's why I'm not overly weepy about Dubya Jr. era (((counterculture))) politics and its priors being exposed as the subversionary rot it was. Turns out traditions existed for a reason and your crotchety old grandpa who complained about niggers, fags, and people getting soft was correct in his assessments.

The problem of that era was a lot of people, including that grandpa wanted you to go die for Israel and honestly, we are going back to those days, as guess who's Trump's running buddy now

 

[tehpope]

Wasn't CBS bought out by some pro-Trump investors a few years ago? That's probably why the company is axing the liberal propaganda shows.

No. There's a merger between Paramount, which owns CBS and Viacom, and Skydance. Its a company founded by Larry Ellison's son, david. Larry, being a co-founded Oracle Software.

The 60 mins thing is probably to look good in front of Trump to approve the merger. The Late Show being cancelled is just them trying cut the fat. CBS is losing $40 million a year on it. There's also plans, apparently, to sell BET to a third party.

This is very similar to the WB Discovery merger a few years ago. Except CBS isn't just gonna shitcan finished projects or current properties and write them off as a loss for a taxes.

 

[moocow]

Colbert was pretty amusing as a correspondent on The Daily Show (that's where he got his "mainstream" start IIRC). When he branched off into The Colbert Report, I tried the first few episodes and it just didn't "click" with me. I got the joke, but it wasn't funny to me. And at that point I was most assuredly a liberal (I got better), but I think the problem was I fucking hated Bill O'Reilly (still do -- dude's a piece of shit) and even a caricature of him was more than I could stand for more than a minute. There was something disingenuous about it too, like it was constantly trying to "trick" people, whether a guest who wasn't in on the joke or the audience themselves.

 

[The Last Stand]

Probably nothing. No one under the age of 60 watches late night broadcast TV or broadcast TV period. CBS/Paramount is probably paying YouTube to push clips from the show to the top of Trending so that'll save them some cash. The whole premise of a talk show with jokes and interviews celebrities, like musical variety shows, is outdated. I hope Colbert tries to stream. Seeing him get less than 500 concurrent viewers without any kind of astroturfing would be hilarious.

What will air late on CBS now? Reruns, old shows?

Anyway, DSP outlasts another one.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

What will air late on CBS now? Reruns, old shows?

Given the age of the demographic tuning in, they should just air infomercials.

 

[The Last Stand]

Given the age of the demographic tuning in, they should just air infomercials.

Old people piss me off. I hope when they inevitably reach the end of their life expectancy, they'll be stuck in purgatory with legacy media, newspapers, asbestos and Facebook memes next to some Indian scammer.

 

[Fartificial Insmelligence]

Colbert’s on the Epstein list, calling it now (pretty sure I read a conspiracy before that he was a nonce)

 

[That Chris Guy]

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Where were you guys when Norm MacDonald got cancelled?

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Wasn't CBS bought out by some pro-Trump investors a few years ago? That's probably why the company is axing the liberal propaganda shows.

No. There's a merger between Paramount, which owns CBS and Viacom, and Skydance. Its a company founded by Larry Ellison's son, david. Larry, being a co-founded Oracle Software.

The 60 mins thing is probably to look good in front of Trump to approve the merger. The Late Show being cancelled is just them trying cut the fat. CBS is losing $40 million a year on it. There's also plans, apparently, to sell BET to a third party.

This is very similar to the WB Discovery merger a few years ago. Except CBS isn't just gonna shitcan finished projects or current properties and write them off as a loss for a taxes.

Viacom and CBS had a weird history with each other. Viacom actually spun off from CBS sometime in the 1970s (something about FCC rules and broadcasting companies owning syndication companies) and got bought by Sumner (((Redstone))) in the late 1980s under his company National Amusements (under Redstone, Viacom bought Gulf+Western, a conglomerate which owned Paramount Pictures). Meanwhile, CBS got bought by electronics giant Westinghouse and that got bought by Viacom (Westinghouse had divested itself of its other divisions and renamed CBS by that time anyway). Then in 2005 Viacom created a new spin-off called "Viacom" and renamed themselves as CBS. This was in the era where Comedy Central and CBS were not owned by the same parent company...but both were majority-controlled by National Amusements, before they merged together in 2019 as ViacomCBS (with original Viacom/2005 CBS as the surviving company).

Problem was that Sumner died that same year, and he was a far better businessman than his daughter Shari was. Now in control of her father's company, Shari proceeded to run ViacomCBS (renamed Paramount Global) into the ground and ended up offloading a bunch of assets which the companies had for years, like Simon & Schuster or CBS Interactive, to the point where are we now—Shari Redstone is now ready to sell out National Amusements entirely to Skydance Media.

Warner and Discovery was a little different since AT&T had purchased TimeWarner in 2018 (still called that even though Time had spun off a few years before) and was looking to offload it to what was in essence a much smaller company, and the box office disappointments in the last ten years haven't helped much.

 

[Echo_Doge]

My last real run-in with late-night TV was when I was working some late-shift jobs. These shitty shows were literally the only thing on besides infomercials, so that's what ended up on TV during lunch break.

And it was like watching the death of comedy. No one would laugh at all. We'd try a different show the next night, still not laugh, and ask each other how/why this shit was still on the air.

The only amusing part was the commentary from my coworkers. These were blue-collar, down-to-earth guys who weren't afraid to say how they felt about the shows out loud.

In order of how hated they were, from least to most:

Jimmy Fallon was always "That jackass who was only funny on SNL" Jimmy Kimmel was "That crying faggot", and Colbert was "That smug, unfunny cocksucker that replaced Letterman"

The only one that was hated more was James Corden from 'The Late Late Show' Literally everyone hated him and there were more than a few times they actually switched to infomercials when his show came on. Because "Hearing ads for Medicare scams and bogus life insurance is better than listening that fat British fuck."

 

[black people]

These were blue-collar, down-to-earth guys who weren't afraid to say how they felt about the shows out loud.

Real salt of the earth types.

 

[verissimus]

Jimmy Fallon was always "That jackass who was only funny on SNL"

I know this is you quoting other guys, but I just have to say that Jimmy Fallon wasn't even funny on SNL. The guy is a comedic vacuum.

 

[Commander X]

The late night talk show was once a keystone of American pop culture, it's decline is not due just to "social media" , the loss of late night TV as a medium is in and of itself not a big deal but as US society becomes increasingly atomized, there has been a loss of shared cultural norms that make various experiences, like those shows like the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson possible, to where they'd pull in like, 15 million or so viewers a night at the show's peak.

Late night talk TV has been dead for a while. Letterman and Leno were the last real ones, when they retired it was basically over. Jimmy Fallon is not a real person. Jimmy Fallon is a homunculus that was created in an evil alchemist's laboratory.

As an aside, the 1960s Tonight Show with Carson, which was shot in New York City, is gone. It's true lost media in that the episodes were wiped and destroyed. Oh, but SKIBBIDI BIDEN is archived, though, so yes, that's fair. sure.

 

[Picnic_Boy]

I know this is you quoting other guys, but I just have to say that Jimmy Fallon wasn't even funny on SNL. The guy is a comedic vacuum.

Fallon belongs on HGTV, saying things like, "I'm super stoked to finally get to renovate an old-fashioned billiards room."