Stephen Colbert will soon be looking for a new job.
CBS announced that it is cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert as a cost-cutting measure. The subtext: Colbert has seen ratings plummet as he turned the legendary comedy show into an anti-Trump variety program and the Tiffany Network could no longer afford to foot the bill.
On Friday’s show, Megyn was joined by Maureen Callahan, host of MK Media’s The Nerve with Maureen Callahan, to discuss the cancellation news and what it says about the state of the media.
Colbert Cancelled
Colbert announced the end of the CBS late-night staple that originated with David Letterman in 1993 in front of his studio audience at the Ed Sullivan Theater on Thursday night. “It’s not just the end of our show, it’s the end of The Late Show on CBS,” Colbert said. “I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.”
He said he was informed the day before that the progam, which he has hosted for a decade, will wrap in May 2026. CBS said the decision was made for “financial” – not editorial – reasons. A statement from the network and its parent company, Paramount Global, called the show “a staple of the nation’s zeitgeist” and claimed the decision “is 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.”
One could infer – as the left and media already are – that those “matters” include the planned merger between Paramount and Skydance Media that requires Trump administration approval and the recent settlement between Paramount and President Donald Trump over the editing of a fall 2024 interview then-Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris gave to 60 Minutes, which Colbert openly criticized.
In a sign of just how political the show had become, Thursday’s lead guest was U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who questioned on X whether Paramount and CBS “ended the Late Show for political reasons” because “the public deserves to know” and “deserves better.”
Trump, meanwhile, relished in the news on Truth Social. “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings,” he posted on Friday, before speculating on the next late-night domino to fall. “I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert.”
He didn’t let NBC’s Jimmy Fallon off the hook either. “Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show,” Trump added.
Downfall of Late Night
As it relates to the financials, Megyn noted that Puck News’ Matthew Belloni reported The Late Show costs more than $100 million a year to produce and is losing more than $40 million a year, which is why CBS executives had been mulling whether to pull the plug for some time.
Those losses stem, in part, from the ever-shrinking audience that Colbert and his fellow network late-night hosts are vying for, and Megyn broke down just how dire the numbers have become for the ‘big three’ of ABC, CBS, and NBC.
To be fair, Colbert has been the best of the bunch ratings-wise, drawing 2.42 million viewers a night overall. That put him ahead of Kimmel with 1.7 million and Fallon with 1.19 million. When you look at the coveted 18- to 49-year-old demo, ABC slightly edged out CBS with 220,000 versus 219,000. “Those numbers are not sustainable because all these shows cost close to $100 million. They are not cheap to produce,” Megyn noted. “There is zero chance that lasts.”
All the while, Gutfeld is drawing 3.29 million viewers in the overall and 238,000 in the demo on cable for a fraction of the cost. “He is higher than all of them for a fraction of the cost because, yes, Greg gets political, but he never forgets the number one rule is to make people laugh,” she noted.
What Went Wrong
In Megyn’s view, the axing is a culturally significant moment. “It is another nail in the coffin for legacy media,” she said. “It’s not just that they are canceling Colbert, they are killing the show altogether.”
Callahan agreed. “Talk shows have been in America’s living rooms basically since the birth of television,” she noted. “And we have been hearing rumblings over at ABC that they’re none too pleased with Jimmy Kimmel’s performance, and he is the next one to go; Jimmy Fallon is down to four days a week, and there have been rumors that his show is on the chopping block; Seth Meyers, who is in the 12:30am slot at NBC, had to fire his band as a cost-cutting measure. It is a dying format.”
Even so, she believes Colbert’s attitude and eschewing comedy for politics helped fuel his demise. “He is such a schoolmarm. He is such a hectoring, humorless lecturer,” Callahan explained. “Hardworking people, at the end of their night, do not want to be lectured by the likes of a bespectacled Stephen Colbert projecting from his diaphragm. They want some laughs, they want some stuff to go down easy, and they want to be lulled to sleep. He is not the guy.”
Ultimately, Megyn said Colbert has no one to blame but himself. “He took that show, which was a great platform in nighttime television at the Ed Sullivan Theater, and completely drove it into the ground,” she said. “He had originally been a Comedy Central where he was more comedy. And when he moved over to CBS, he decided to be more pundit. He desperately wanted to be Keith Olbermann. And guess what? Keith Olbermann is a failure, and now so are you, Stephen Colbert.”
You can check out Megyn’s full interview with Callahan by tuning in to episode 1,111 on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you like to listen. And don’t forget that you can catch The Megyn Kelly Show live on SiriusXM’s Triumph (channel 111) weekdays from 12pm to 2pm ET.