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

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 the-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?”

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