The end of Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ has implications beyond late-night TV

The comedian has criticized CBS parent company Paramount Global for settling its lawsuit with President Donald Trump.

The facts are these: The highest-rated show on late night was nominated for an Emmy on Tuesday. On Thursday, Paramount/CBS announced its cancellation. Stephen Colbert announced at the Thursday evening taping of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” that he’d found out, only the night before, that his show would be canceled at the end of the season, in May 2026, and that no one would be replacing him. “It’s the end of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS,” he said. “This is all just going away.”

It was a shocking announcement. It feels, for one thing, like an institution is ending — one David Letterman helped define in reaction (and opposition) to “The Tonight Show” in 1993. And it’s not, from the business side, that big a surprise; late-night television has been languishing for some time. CBS canceled “The Late, Late Show with James Corden” in 2023 and Taylor Tomlinson’s show “After Midnight” in March.

But it’s hard to ignore a larger, troubling pattern here with potential implications for far more than late-night TV.

On July 1, the announcement came that the network’s parent company, Paramount Global — which needs Donald Trump’s administration to approve the pending sale of the company to Skydance Media — was settling (rather than fighting) the president’s lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” interview of then-candidate Kamala Harris. They will be paying the president $16 million. Before the settlement, CBS News CEO Wendy McMahon and “60 Minutes” executive producer Bill Owens both left (or were made to) after registering their disapproval. Those who remain are clearly shaken. “Can you hold power to account after paying it millions?” John Dickerson, the anchor for “CBS Evening News,” said while reporting on the deal the day the settlement was announced. “Can an audience trust you when it thinks you’ve traded away that trust?”

In his first show back from vacation this week, Colbert took his own network to task for the settlement, calling it a “big fat bribe.” Equally critical was Jon Stewart, Colbert’s former “Daily Show” colleague, who returned last year to helm his old show one day a week. Comedy Central is also owned by Paramount Global, and Stewart — who unpacked the central claim in the “60 Minutes” lawsuit and characterized it as meritless — called the payment a demonstration of “fealty.” He also compared the transaction to something you might see in “Goodfellas” in an on-air interview with retired “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft (who broadly agreed).

In Colbert’s monologue about the settlement, which aired three days ago, the comic openly joked about his own career prospects and potentially getting pressured by the network. “Okay, okay, but how are they going to put pressure on Stephen Colbert, if they can’t find him?” he joked (pointing to a mustache he grew while on vacation). He was also obliquely addressing rumors speculating that Skydance boss David Ellison might court Trump’s approval by getting rid of Colbert and Stewart — two of the fiercest Trump critics on television — if the deal goes through.

The irony, for longtime fans of Colbert, is that his output has been comparatively bland, not to say toothless, since he took over “The Late Show.” He hasn’t been bad, but his political material — of which there’s been quite a bit — has tended to be bog-standard anti-Trump stuff, perfectly well-written but not comedically distinct. That’s been a little odd for those who know him as a topsy-turvy genius who used to specialize in unexpected angles of attack. Colbert has a formidable intellect and he’s upsettingly quick. On “The Colbert Report,” where he played a Bill O’Reilly type from 2005 to 2014, he skewered his interlocutors by adroitly outmaneuvering them, routinely exposing hypocrisies and contradictions before his subjects caught on. The structure of his interviews was bewilderingly good. The final twist was sometimes so perfect it felt scripted.

Put simply: Colbert’s comedic superpower is savagely adversarial. Sure, there was sometimes a genial veneer; in character as a right-wing firebrand, he got people to let their guard down by playing up the bombast. But the mind that made “The Colbert Report” wasn’t reassuring. It was unsettling, astringent.

Late-night TV, a notoriously friendly and rather sincere medium, didn’t really let Colbert showcase those talents. He had to water himself down, become more generic. As a comic, he’s been working with one hand tied behind his back. It says something that he still became the most popular host.

Watered down or not, the president sure doesn’t like him. “I briefly watched an interview of Stephen Colbert on highly government subsidized PBS, and found it fascinating for only one reason — Why would they be wasting time and the public’s money on this complete and total loser?” he posted on Truth Social in September of last year. On the day Colbert’s show was canceled, the House passed a bill approving Trump’s demand that funding to public broadcasters NPR and PBS be cut.

CBS knows what all this looks like. They’re trying very hard to address the optics. “This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” read a statement from George Cheeks, co-CEO of Paramount Global and president and chief executive of CBS, Amy Reisenbach, president of CBS Entertainment, and David Stapf, president of CBS Studios. “It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”