While the left is lamenting the loss of Stephen Colbert, their CBS late-night shill, the network had already given Colbert years of operating at a huge loss before finally cancelling him.
CBS announced on Thursday that it will be shutting down The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in March of next year. Network bosses aren’t merely sending Colbert to the unemployment line, but they are ending the entire production, marking the end of the network’s decades-long tradition of late night television that started with host David Letterman in 1993.
Colbert opened his show Thursday with a note to fans that the show will be winding down, and as the studio audience booed the network, he thanked fans and employees alike for putting on the show since he came on as host in 2015.
But the cancellation is not exactly sudden or unjustified. According to Puck’s Matthew Belloni, the top execs at CBS have been wrestling with the problem for months, and Colbert himself was alerted that there were cancellation plans coming.
As it turns out, he has been a huge drag on the network. Belloni noted that The Late Show has been losing about $40 million a year at least — since the 2021 season when ad revenue plummeted and never began ticking back up.
The Late show is simply not worth the $100 million annual production costs, and CBS says that the cancellation is just a matter of economics.
The cancellation has nothing to do with Colbert’s constant left-wing tilt, either. It’s all about the Benjamins. “Trust me, there’s no conspiracy,” a source told Belloni about the cancellation.
The big question here is, how long will it be before NBC and ABC follow suit and ditch their late-night shows — all of which are losing money and viewers.
Still, the pure economics of the matter isn’t stopping the conspiracy theorists on the left who in their fevered imagination have decided that Colbert’s firing is a favor to President Donald Trump, who just won a huge $16 million settlement from CBS/Paramount after he sued them for election interference.
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