On Thursday CBS announced that “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” will end in May.
Credit...Scott Kowalchyk/CBS

Why Is Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ Getting Canceled?

Maybe the “Late Show” decision is purely financial. But after Paramount’s cave over “60 Minutes,” it is hard to trust.

by · NY Times

In 2005, on his satire “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness,” meaning a statement that was not actually true but represented a reality that the speaker wished to inhabit.

In 2015, Colbert replaced David Letterman on CBS’s “Late Show,” which under him became one of the biggest and most prolific launchers of satirically guided missiles during the Trump era. In 2024, President Trump — who has repeatedly bemoaned his late-night coverage — said CBS “should terminate his contract.”

Now, in 2025, CBS has said that it is canceling Colbert’s show at the end of its season, next May. Executives stressed, in the announcement, that the cut was “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.”

Is that the truth, or merely truthy?

There is good reason that CBS would need to offer that assurance. The network’s parent company, Paramount, just this month settled a lawsuit from President Trump, over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, for $16 million. At the same time, Paramount was hoping to close a multibillion-dollar merger with the company Skydance, which required the approval of the Trump administration.

Many legal experts said the deal was an unnecessary concession in a frivolous case. At minimum it undermined one of TV journalism’s most accomplished independent voices. Some people called it “a big, fat bribe” — actually, those were Colbert’s words, in a blistering monologue a few days ago, which also mentioned speculation that CBS’s future owners might try to rein him in.

Talk show hosts have bitten the hand that signs the contracts before; Letterman needled NBC and its then-parent, General Electric. But back then, the issues did not involve conflicts with a president willing to pull any necessary levers to punish and influence media outlets.

Now Paramount wants to assure us that the cancellation of one of the president’s most famous critics is totally and coincidentally business. And sure — it absolutely could be.

Is it possible that Paramount decided to get out of the late-night business strictly as business? Of course. Late-night TV’s ratings and ad revenue have been declining for years — though Colbert’s show has beaten its competition in most of its run.

Could the particular finances of “Late Show” be so dire, despite its ratings, that CBS can’t justify sustaining it? Maybe. The number of late-night shows has dwindled. CBS abandoned the traditional 12:30 a.m. talk format after James Corden left in 2023. In March it canceled the replacement, “After Midnight” with Taylor Tomlinson.

But can anyone simply take Paramount at its word that “other matters” have no influence on its decision-making? Its explanation is being questioned by outsiders, including Democratic Senators Adam B. Schiff of California and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. And the company has only itself to blame.

This is what happens when a company caves to this sort of pressure. Paramount can say that “60 Minutes” will operate without interference. It can say that it is not canceling political comedy for political reasons. But it has opened itself up to doubt.

There is life after late night, of course. After his shabby treatment by NBC in his short run on “The Tonight Show,” Conan O’Brien went on to host a cable talk show and later become an inventive and self-reinventing podcast host.

Colbert, 61, could find a new frontier in a similar way. Or he could get snapped up by Netflix, which is experimenting in talk with John Mulaney, or another deep-pocketed streamer looking to get into the game. Whether those resources could buy the same cultural reach Colbert had at CBS is another question.

But you have to wonder about the long-term future of topical comedy on major networks, if the owners are vulnerable to pressure and the shows have diminishing ratings to justify their sharp elbows. Jimmy Kimmel is still on ABC, though that network settled its own lawsuit from the president last year. In January the president said that NBC’s owner, Comcast, should “pay a big price” for the jabs that Seth Meyers has taken at him.

You have to wonder, for that matter, about what happens with Colbert’s former colleague Jon Stewart, whose “Daily Show” is also a Paramount property. On his podcast this week, Stewart considered the show’s future under Skydance, run by David Ellison, whose father, the tech mogul and Trump associate Larry Ellison, is largely bankrolling the deal.

“Unfortunately, we haven’t heard anything from them,” Stewart said. “We’ve all got a surmise about who actually is owning it and what his ideology is, but ideology may not play a part. I just don’t know.”

There’s a lot to wonder about. What we do know is that the president, who has long cried for political comics’ heads — won’t someone rid him of these turbulent hosts? — has gotten another item on his wish list. “I absolutely love that Colbert’ got fired,” he wrote on his platform Truth Social.

And we know that after next May, powerful people will continue to provide material for comedy writers. But you’ll have to look elsewhere for the punchline.

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