Nolte: Variety Admits Stephen Colbert Awarded Participation Emmy for Getting Cancelled

After ten seasons, it took a cancellation announcement to finally deliver Stephen Colbert an Emmy that obviously had nothing to do with merit and everything to do with the left-wing affirmative action that has propped talentless and/or unpopular leftists for decades.

“The Late Show With Stephen Colbert may have been canceled, but it won the respect of the Hollywood industry,” reports the far-left Variety. “Including the two additional nominations from this year’s Emmy lineup, the CBS staple had amassed 33 Emmy nominations since its debut in 2015.”

Yes — and it lost all but one.

Variety even admits (accidentally) that Colbert was rewarded, not for merit but for — lol — getting canceled.

“Many see the awarding of the series as a reaction to the outcry over CBS’s controversial decision to cancel The Late Show for what the network cited as ‘financial reasons,’” Variety writes.

Those “financial reasons” involve a reported $40 to $50 million annual loss for CBS because the show’s ratings, like most leftist TV, have gone over a cliff.

For a number of years, not only was Colbert a recipient of left-wing affirmative action from CBS in the form of keeping his money pit of a TV show on the air despite the losses (including all those Emmy losses), but Colbert will slink off the air next year with only an affirmative-action Emmy.

For the record, Colbert took over the CBS Late Show from David Letterman. Letterman hosted The Late Show for 22 years, between 1993 and 2015. During those 22 years, Letterman’s Late Show won nine Emmys.

For his part, Colbert’s Comedy Central Daily Show spinoff, The Colbert Report, did win two Emmys for Outstanding Variety Series in 2013 and 2014, but that was when he was still delivering laughs instead of pandering applause lines to his trained-seal audience.

This summer’s Late Show cancellation announcement was received with the usual canned outrage from a corrupt leftist media and entertainment establishment that believes Colbert should remain on the air despite the $50 million annual loss. Merit doesn’t matter to these folks. Colbert is a good little establishment gerbil who says and does what’s expected of him, so he should continue to be rewarded with a network TV show.

During the entire second quarter of 2025, Colbert averaged only 2.417 million viewers. Though Greg Gutfeld’s late-night show is available in far fewer homes (broadcast v. cable), Gutfeld! still averaged almost a million more viewers than Colbert — 3.289 million. In the 18-49 age demo that sets advertising rates, Gutfeld! averaged 238,000 compared to Colbert’s 218,000.

And I would bet dollars to donuts that Gutfeld’s production cost is a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to prop up the divisive, smug, mean-spirited, affirmative-action recipient Stephen Colbert.

For those accusing me of bias, I think it’s outrageous that, after 23 seasons, Real Time with Bill Maher has never won an Emmy. Regardless of your politics, Maher’s show is sharply written, legitimately funny, and still matters to the national conversation. Maher is wrong about many things, but he’s no trained seal, so no Emmys for him.

John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover and on Kindle and Audiobook.