Years from now, the enduring image of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert likely will be the host himself — along with David Letterman — tossing furniture from the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater onto the CBS “eye” logo.
Letterman created CBS’ The Late Show franchise in 1993, which Colbert took over in 2015. CBS is cancelling the show and renting the time period to Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed.
Letterman, who tossed everything from watermelons to fluorescent light bulbs off the Ed Sullivan roof, told viewers “this brings true joy to my heart. We’re up here for the wonton destruction of CBS property.”
Some have argued that CBS’ new owners Skydance Media, headed by Trump ally David Ellison, is destroying the legacy broadcasting company — with the departures of high-profile personalities, changes at the CBS Evening News and the top-rated 60 Minutes, and pulling the plug on the CBS Radio News after 99 years on May 29.
Next comes the demolition of The Late Show set at the historical Ed Sullivan Theater, where The Beatles performed in 1964. CBS bought the building in 1993 for Letterman, after he quit NBC when passed over to replace Johnny Carson as Tonight Show host.
The cancellation of Colbert’s popular show — which has relentlessly poked fun at Trump — was announced last July by CBS Paramount a week before the Trump-friendly Federal Communications Commission approved the Skydance-Paramount merger. A coincidence? Hardly.
Consider the timetable:
- In early July, CBS Paramount announced it was giving Trump $16 million to settle “what many people consider to be a frivolous lawsuit against CBS News for how they edited a Kamala Harris interview in 2024," says CNN’s Jake Tapper. "I don’t know one credible legal expert who thought that case had any merit.”
- On the July 14 Late Show, Colbert told viewers: “Now I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles. Its 'big fat bribe.' ”
- Three days later, on July 17, CBS announced it canceled The Late Show, which had been No. 1 for nine consecutive seasons, “purely as a financial decision” because it was losing money.
- The FCC approved the Skydance-Paramount deal July 24.
Since Skydance took over in August, and appointed legacy media critic Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief in October, evening news anchor John Dickerson, CBS Saturday Morning hosts Michelle Miller and Dana Jacobson, and 60 Minutes correspondent Anderson Cooper have left the network.
Shortly after Weiss elevated Tony Dukoupil from the morning show to CBS Evening News anchor in January, she procured a Dukoupli interview with Trump with the promise not to edit or cut it. She arranged a May 10 60 Minutes interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by giving him a choice of speaking with Leslie Stahl or CBS newsman Major Garrett. (He chose Garrett.)
Last week The Late Show opening mocked CBS for “reporting live from the wrong China.” While ABC’s David Muir and NBC’s Tom Llamas reported from Beijing, Dukoupil broadcast from Taiwan because CBS failed to obtain a visa for Dokoupil in time.
In his opening monologue Colbert joked, “Well, that is disappointing, but it does fit in with their slogan: CBS News: When events happen, we’re at most one country away.”
Trump has constantly waged a war of words on social media with Colbert and fellow late-night TV hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Jon Oliver and Seth Meyers because of their comments about him and his administration. The four late-night stars appeared on Colbert’s show May 11 to demonstrate their solidarity as “targets of a vengeful government with an extremely low tolerance for satire,” wrote Bill Carter, former New York Times TV writer.
Or any regard for freedom of speech and the First Amendment.
To his credit, Colbert is going down swinging.
“We may have been canceled, but apparently The Late Show has outlived the Constitution of the United States,” Colbert said Tuesday. “Because yesterday, without any congressional or court approval, completely unilaterally, Donald Trump gave himself a $1.8-billion taxpayer-fueled slush fund . . . It’s an unprecedented level of grift. It’s an all-you-can-fraud buffet.”
Noting that the settlement also prevented the government from auditing the taxes of Trump, his family and companies, Colbert added, “He gave himself a Get Out Of Jail Free card.”
Last week Colbert’s crew altered the Ten Commandments movie, replacing the golden calf with the 22-foot gold statue of Trump recently dedicated at the president’s Miami, Fla., golf course.
And after the government released 160 secret UFO files, Colbert said it was “so people could connect the dots.” A dot pattern appeared on the screen and when connected they read: “Hey, remember the Epstein files?”
Colbert’s final shows have been as memorable as Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show wind-down in 1992. Colbert devoted an entire hour to Barack Obama at his new presidential library in Chicago. Jon Stewart, Billy Crystal, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Sally Field, Letterman and his bandleader Paul Schaefer have stopped by. I’ve seen speculation that George Clooney — who was Colbert’s first guest on Sept. 8, 2015 — could stop by for the finale.
Over the years, late night hosts have come and gone since Steve Allen invented late-night TV in 1954. Entire late-night shows have been canceled before, too. CBS pulled out of the 11:30 p.m. time slot after canceling Merv Griffin in 1972, and the short-lived Pat Sajack Show (1989-90) before reclaiming it with Letterman. CBS surrendered the Late Late Show hour when James Corden left three years ago.
Without Colbert, ratings for Kimmel and Fallon probably will spike. That’s what happens.
It will be interesting to see what Skydance Paramount does with CBS, and with CNN, which it’s acquiring in the purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery. It’s their company, and they can run it how they like. But they also run the risk of losing viewers — in other words, ratings and revenues — by appealing to an audience of one in the White House.
As New Yorker media critic A.J. Liebling wrote in 1960: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Trump allies control CBS, Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, and soon CNN, while Trump has shut down the Voice of America; yanked funding from public broadcasting; insulting reporters for questions he doesn’t like; and saying that news stories with information critical of his administration are acts of treason. We’re witnessing an unprecedented attack on the media landscape.
As soon as Friday, crews could begin trashing the Late Show set. That’s how quickly the demolition started after Letterman left.
To be honest, I thought the choice of Colbert to succeed Letterman was a disaster in 2015. Colbert at the time was playing a brash right-wing TV host, basically a satire of Bill O’Reilly, as host of The Colbert Report, a spinoff of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show. I questioned if the real Colbert would be as funny or creative as his conservative blowhard character.
I was wrong. The real Colbert was really, really funny. So was his staff of 200 (the size of which could have contributed to the show losing money, as CBS contends).
What will Colbert, who just turned 62, do next? Will he follow Letterman onto a streaming platform? I’ll be watching.
As Letterman told Colbert and his viewers last week: “You can take away a man’s show. You can’t take a man’s voice.”
John Kiesewetter’s opinion is his own, and not that of Cincinnati Public Radio.
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