Last Updated on: 21st July 2025, 01:12 pm
I’m not going to sit here and say that Paramount is lying when it says that the decision to cancel the Late Show next year was a financial one. The world has changed a lot this century. The entertainment landscape is much more fragmented now than I think a lot of us ever could have imagined, and it’s hit traditional TV extremely hard. There are still a lot of people watching, but that number is getting smaller all the time. Even a well rated show isn’t necessarily going to command the same type of advertising money that it used to, and even though segments from the late night shows often pull in millions of views on YouTube (I’m one of them because I’m old and have to get up in the morning), the economics of that are often quite different, which you can go ahead and read as not as lucrative. So it stands to reason that even a show that appears successful could become a drag on the bottom line, especially when it’s not cheap to produce.
With that said, however, if you think that I think that they’re being completely honest when they go out of their way to say it’s all money and has nothing at all to do with anything going on at Paramount, then I think that you’re nuts.
Stephen Colbert has been going hard after the Trump administration on his show nearly every night for a decade. Paramount, which owns CBS, is itself trying to merge with a company called Skydance Media, which is controlled by Larry and David Ellison, billionaires who count themselves as Trump supporters and who apparently already have plans to make the network more conservative. There is a multi-billion dollar deal in place, but in order for it to be made official, it needs regulatory approval. That approval needs to come from the FCC, which is at present controlled by a Trump supporting lunatic who seems pretty committed to doing whatever dear leader tells him he’s going to do. Dear leader, meanwhile, had filed a lawsuit against CBS during last year’s election campaign accusing the network of deceptively editing an interview that 60 Minutes conducted with Kamala Harris. that lawsuit, according to basically everyone up to and including some of Paramount’s own lawyers, was frivolous as shit. But because corporations are largely soulless entities devoid of principles, instead of putting the merger on hold and using their considerable resources to defend the freedom of news departments everywhere and to hand Trump his ass, they went ahead and settled it for $16 million. On his show last Monday, Colbert called this exactly what it is. “A big fat bribe.” By Thursday, he was being slow walked out the door. If you don’t think the timing there is at least a little suspect, then I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.
I want to believe that this is an isolated incident, but I’m not that naive. If I’m Jimmy Kimmel or Seth Meyers or especially everyone at the Daily Show which is also owned by Paramount, I’m starting to get nervous. ABC, which airs Kimmel, has already settled one of Trump’s other stupid news department lawsuits, so it’s not unthinkable that they wouldn’t go to bat for an expensive Trump hating comedian if they thought it would be advantageous.
No, late night television isn’t what it used to be, but it’s still important, especially now. It’s one of the only places left in the mainstream where you can hear what’s really going on and be told straight up how not normal it all is. If we lose that, especially for the reasons we’ve just lost some of it, I think we lose more than we realize.