“The Late Show” with Stephen Colbert will officially end on May 21st. What will happen to the late night talk genre at CBS and beyond?
Stephen Colbert may be leaving CBS, but his career isn’t over yet
Returning to Benjamin Franklin, political satire has played a rich and storied role in American history. Stephen Colbert is part of that history, too.
We all know that Stephen Colbert and the CBS “Late Show” series are officially parting ways this month. But no one knows what will happen next.
Over the past 10 months, since the embattled Colbert announced he would be canceling his talk show after 30 years in July 2025, the countdown to his departure has loomed over him and the entire late-night genre like a guillotine with a frayed rope. With just a few days left until the May 21 finale (which will air without competition from other shows), only uncertainty looms on the other side of Colbert’s farewell.
CBS has announced that the comedy series “Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen” will take over Colbert’s weekday 11:35 p.m. slot after “Late Show” ends, but it’s unclear whether that’s a temporary or long-term solution. And as Colbert’s colleagues Jimmy Fallon (NBC’s “The Tonight Show”), Jimmy Kimmel (ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”) and Seth Meyers (NBC’s “Late Night”) resume their normal lives in a world without Colbert’s nightly voice, are they waiting for a knife to fall on their necks?
“It feels like the end of an era,” says Paley Center for Media curator Jason Lynch. “For decades, it seemed far-fetched that late night as we know it would cease to exist. It’s now fair to speculate whether the current group of late-night hosts will be the last to hold such a job.”
Will CBS ever return to traditional late-night talk shows?
Is CBS getting rid of late-night talk hosts, or just ones with Colbert-like tone?
From the moment Colbert announced the show’s cancellation, speculation abounded as to his motives for leaving CBS and parent company Paramount (now Paramount Skydance).
At the time, Paramount called it a “purely financial” decision, but commentators lashed out, pointing out that Colbert had recently criticized his boss and the company was in the midst of a merger with Skydance. Skydance was previously led by David Ellison, the son of prominent Trump supporter Larry Ellison (David Ellison is now CEO of the newly merged Paramount Skydance, which is also in the process of acquiring the storied Hollywood film company Warner Bros.). Did Colbert, a prominent Trump critic, not fit in with the new administration’s political atmosphere? Was Paramount worried about getting the merger approved, or was it purely mercenary as the media industry fights to survive?
“Two things could be true,” Colbert himself recently told the New York Times. “Sometimes the broadcast industry is in trouble. You can’t monetize it because of streaming competition because of things like YouTube. They’ve got the books, and I’m not going to argue with them about what their business model is and why it doesn’t work anymore. But less than two years after the call to end the show, they had been wanting to sign me for so long. So something changed.”
“Comics Unleashed” is a much different show than “Late Show” and ultimately costs less.
Media mogul and producer Byron Allen waged a massive campaign to acquire a self-funded show in this time slot, convincing enough for CBS to greenlight it for the 2026-2027 season. But like any TV show in today’s media environment, there are no guarantees about the future.
Clare Ransom, head of digital marketing and PR and founder of Aloha Digital, said Comics “works well for CBS when the goal is near-term cost control and predictable revenue, but it’s less clear whether it fits with the network’s long-term brand strategy in its flagship broadcast slot, which has historically used late night to build cultural relevance.”
“Current reports suggest that CBS is explicitly using this period as an interim step to develop other ideas,” Ransom added, “which means Mr. Allen’s tenure is not guaranteed.”
What would go into that time slot if “Comics” didn’t last? Well, there’s always the possibility that the network will run reruns of prime-time shows and other extremely cheap outsourced shows just to keep the lights on. But saying goodbye to “Late Show” doesn’t preclude CBS from trying the traditional (or non-traditional) talk show format again someday.
Although ratings are down for the 11:35 p.m. broadcast, there’s no denying that distinctly conservative talk host Greg Gutfeld is drawing viewers to his 10 p.m. Fox News show. But Gutfeld has the big advantage of being aired in an earlier primetime slot, where more viewers are awake and tuning in to all the networks. Shows like NBC’s “Chicago PD” and CBS’ “Boston Blue” typically draw 3 or 4 million viewers at 10 p.m. (Mr. Gutfeld’s viewership hovers around 3 million). Will CBS one day choose a host with a different perspective for 11:35 p.m.?Onlookers can only guess and speculate.
Is this the end of Colbert or the end of late night television as we know it?
For years, late-night TV comedians have suffered viewership declines, lean toward political humor over cultural perspectives, and struggled to adapt to a modern media landscape where streaming services, YouTube, and TikTok compete with traditional TV viewing. In 2025, CBS ended the 12:30 a.m. comedy panel show After Midnight after just over a year after host Taylor Tomlinson decided to leave the show in favor of a stand-up career. NBC’s Seth Meyers’ “Late Night” will eliminate its live studio band in 2024 as a cost-cutting measure. “The Tonight Show” will go from five nights a week to four in 2024, joining other late-night shows. Conan O’Brien, who briefly took over the Tonight Show throne in 2009 and 2010, transitioned from decades of traditional late-night television at NBC and then TBS to podcasting, now a huge media market in its own right. Samantha Bee’s TBS talk show was also canceled in July 2022.
But things aren’t as simple as ratings, TikTok views, dollars and cents. Whether we tune in live every weeknight or not, late-night TV remains one of the biggest places we go to process major cultural moments, from the shooting death of Charlie Kirk (which sparked the Jimmy Kimmel controversy in September 2025) to the release of Taylor Swift’s new album. Perhaps that’s part of why Colbert’s old friend Jon Stewart, who made his name as a prominent late-night voice on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” from 1997 to 2015, actually returns to his old home once a week to speak about politics and current events. A brief stint on a streaming Apple TV investigative show (“The Jon Stewart Problem,” 2021-2023) wasn’t as good as sitting behind the same old “Daily” desk at 11 p.m. Traditional late night is trickling into new media, rather than the other way around: Comedian and actor Ben Grave will launch “Goodnight with Ben Grave” on YouTube on May 28 with a leading veteran late night producer from “The Daily Show.”
But some in Hollywood are less optimistic about the future of late-night talk.
“I’d be surprised if it lasted more than a year or so,” former “Late Show” host and genre legend David Letterman told The New York Times this month. “Well, it might be a particular show. I don’t think it’ll ever go away because it’s just the best. It’s humans talking to humans.”
“If that were to happen, it would be very surprising to me that it was completely gone,” Kimmel said in January, when he accepted the Critics Choice Award for Best Talk Show. “Maybe it won’t be as big, and there won’t be a big band hosting the stage, and there won’t be 15 writers, but I think there will be a version of it that’s like a late-night talk show.”
“Late-night talk shows have been an integral part of television since the beginning of ‘The Tonight Show’ in 1954,” said Lynch, the Paley curator. “The current slate of shows and hosts prove that this format still has a lot of life left in it, and what happens on these shows still has the potential to occasionally make global headlines and dominate pop culture conversations.”
Watch for Trump and Kimmel’s latest feud, the steamy coverage of the last few episodes of Colbert’s reign, or Fallon launching a new show on NBC. There is history here and there is a powerful voice. There’s a moment of cultural fame, solidarity and catharsis in men in suits telling jokes (more women wouldn’t be a bad thing). It’s worth it, even if the genre has to evolve.
You’ll have to follow the laughs to find out what happens next.
