Late-night host Stephen Colbert introduced on July 17, throughout a dwell broadcast, that CBS would be canceling “The Late Show.”
Colbert was fast to forged the transfer as political, with longtime good friend Jon Stewart going additional on “The Every day Present,” portraying Colbert as a sufferer of Trumpian machinations — full with a gospel choir refrain of “Go f— yourself” aimed squarely at CBS executives.
It made for pleasing theater however conspicuously lacked counterfactual arguments. Amid the bluster, neither Stewart nor Colbert provided a critical protection of the present’s underlying enterprise efficiency.
Let or not it’s acknowledged with readability: “The Late Present” was not primarily felled by politics. It was a casualty of viewers migration — away from legacy tv and towards streaming, social media and podcasts.
“The Late Present” wasn’t merely canceled — it was euthanized.
Colbert constructed “The Late Present” round political comedy, an extension of his Comedy Central persona rooted in partisan satire. It labored within the linear TV period, particularly through the Trump presidency. However it’s ill-suited for the digital economic system the place content material lives or dies by shareability and replay worth.
Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Present,” formed by his Saturday Evening Dwell roots, mixes sketch comedy, musical impersonations and celeb video games. This format isn’t solely apolitical — it usually incorporates gentle political touches — however it’s constructed for viral clips that may thrive for years on TikTok, YouTube and Instagram lengthy after the unique broadcast.
Fallon boasts 76.3 million social followers — over 3 times Colbert’s 20.7 million — and drew 9.2 billion social views from June 2024 to Might 2025.
Pew Research exhibits 75 p.c of TikTok creators with over 1 million followers concentrate on leisure, whereas solely 6 p.c create political content material. Political monologues decay shortly. Sketches, musical bits and celeb impressions accrue long-tail worth, driving each cultural forex and incremental income.
Colbert could have edged Fallon in TV rankings, however Fallon gained the place it issues now: digital relevance and monetization.
Even acclaimed exhibits should make cash. Working “The Late Present” was like CBS funding a tentpole blockbuster yearly, solely with out the field workplace returns. CBS insiders estimate the present lost $40 to 50 million annually for years. Manufacturing prices, including a staff of nearly 200, approached $100 million a yr. Revenues by no means got here shut — ad sales fell 25 percent to about $70 million by 2024, and streaming added simply $60 million over four years.
Megan Kelly recently noted that her Fox Information primetime present, “The Kelly File,” generated $100 million in income with by no means greater than 12 staff, at one-tenth Colbert’s price. “Gutfeld!” (late-night’s current ratings king) reportedly operates on similar lean metrics.
Like Colbert, Greg Gutfeld’s Fox present lacks Fallon’s variety-show enchantment, however in contrast to Colbert, he isn’t shackled to an enormous finances and constantly delivers huge working margins.
Paramount’s phrase “challenging revenue environment” was boardroom code for this fact: “The Late Present” was structurally unprofitable and had been for years. Cancellation was not political. It was a monetary inevitability.
It is also essential to know that rankings will not be sufficient on their very own. In his on-air cancellation announcement, Colbert cited his Nielsen rankings lead — 2.4 million viewers vs. Fallon’s 2.1 million in the second quarter of 2025 — as proof of his unjustified cancellation. However rankings don’t pay the payments.
Advertisers purchase monetizable attain, more and more discovered on-line. Fallon’s broader enchantment throughout digital platforms drew far more advertiser dollars, despite his smaller television audience. A slim win in a shrinking broadcast demographic is meaningless when the advert {dollars} stream elsewhere.
Colbert led the flawed scoreboard, and CBS executives knew it.
Late-night TV additionally cannibalizes itself. CBS, NBC, and ABC chase the identical progressive-leaning viewers according to Pew Research, splitting an already shrinking base 3 ways. “The Late Present” by no means really owned its viewers, it shared it.
“Gutfeld!” doesn’t have that downside. As the one mainstream right-leaning comedy present, it drew roughly 3.3 million viewers in the second quarter of 2025, commonly outpacing Colbert. It operates on a far leaner budget and is probably going the one constantly worthwhile late-night present.
Colbert’s partisan visitor record — 176 left-leaning guests versus one Republican since 2022 — left no room for development past his base.
Cable information affords the identical lesson: ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN carve up the progressive pie, whereas Fox consolidates the appropriate and sometimes wins nightly rankings outright. Fragmentation kills margins. Fox dominates as a result of it owns an unshared lane.
All of those enterprise failures — the weak content material technique, continual losses, hole rankings, and fractured viewers — sit atop a deeper fact: Colbert’s cancellation was much less about politics than about migration. A tectonic shift is happening in how audiences devour comedy, and it has left your complete late-night format stranded in a dying medium.
Twine-cutting surged after the 2008 monetary disaster, and a brand new technology is being raised on iPhones and streaming apps, by no means having subscribed to TV within the first place. Pew Research data shows that by 2015, U.S. tv subscriptions had already peaked after which started a steep, irreversible decline.
Audiences pivoted to streaming platforms, podcasts and on-demand comedy specials, the place authenticity and autonomy changed the outdated nightly broadcast ritual. Right this moment, late-night selection comedy TV hosts are experiencing the whiplash of that unabated 10-year migration.
In opposition to this backdrop, the big-budget, five-nights-a-week selection format is a legacy product — a typewriter in a PC world.
Poking the orange bear could have accelerated Colbert’s demise, however it was merely a number one indicator of the bigger fact: The commercial mannequin that sustained late-night tv is collapsing, and no quantity of political framing by Colbert, Stewart or anybody else can disguise that reality.
The late Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking’s famous line was that “intelligence is the flexibility to adapt to vary.” Colbert and his crew confirmed little of that adaptive intelligence within the face of a quickly evolving viewers panorama.
Stephen Lile is a technique and innovation fellow on the College of Cambridge Decide Enterprise College. He’s coauthor of the forthcoming e-book “Organized Science Denial,” (Oxford College Press which discusses the information media’s function in misinformation and disinformation.