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Late-night host Stephen Colbert announced on July 17 that CBS will cancel “late performances” during live broadcasts.
Colbert quickly took the move as politics, with long-time friend Jon Stewart further portraying Colbert as a victim of Trump’s conspiracy on The Daily Show, with a gospel choir with “go f———————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————
It was made for a pleasant drama, but it was clearly lacking in counterfactual arguments. Neither Stewart nor Colbert offered a serious defense of the show’s basic business performance in the fire.
Let it clearly say: “Late” is not primarily caused by politics. This is the casualty of audience migration – away from traditional TV and streaming, social media and podcasts.
“Last Performance” was not only cancelled – it was euthanized.
Colbert established a “late show” around political comedy, an extension of his comedy-centric character rooted in partisan satire. It works in the era of linear TV, especially during President Trump. However, it is not suitable for the digital economy, where content lives or dies due to sharing and replaying value.
Jimmy Fallon’s Tonight Show is made up of his Mix shutters comedy, musical parody and celebrity games. This format is not entirely apolitical—it usually contains a soft political style—but it was built for virus clips that could thrive on Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram, and it had been thriving on Tiktok, YouTube and Instagram long ago.
Fallon has 76.3 million social followers, more than three times, Colbert’s 20.7 million times, and attracted 9.2 billion social views from June 2024 to May 2025.
Pew research shows that 75% of Tiktok creators with more than 1 million followers focused on entertainment, while only 6% create political content. Political monologues fade rapidly. Sketches, musical clips and celebrity impressions have long tail value that promotes cultural currency and increases revenue.
Colbert may have already named Fallon as a TV viewership, but Fallon won the importance of now: digital relevance and monetization.
Even well-received shows have to make money. Participating in “late performances” is like CBS providing funds for tent pillar blockbusters every year, only without box office returns. CBS insiders estimate that the show lost $400,000 to $50 million per year over the years. Production costs, including nearly 200 employees, are close to $100 million a year. Revenue never completed – Advertising sales fell 25% to $70 million by 2024, while streaming increased by just $60 million in four years.
Megan Kelly recently pointed out that her Fox News prime-time show Kelly File earned $100 million and cost more than 12 employees at a cost of more than 12 employees. “Gutfield!” reportedly, (Late Night’s Current Rating King) operates on similar lean metrics.
Like Colbert, Greg Gutfeld’s Fox performance lacks Fallon’s variety show appeal, but unlike Colbert, he doesn’t put a huge budget and consistently provides a larger operating profit.
Paramount’s phrase for “challenging income environment” is the board code for this fact: “Late” is structurally unprofitable and has been around for years. Cancellation is not political. This is a financial necessity.
Understanding the rating itself is not enough, which is also crucial. Colbert cited his Nelson ratings lead in his air cancellation announcement – 2.4 million viewers in the second quarter of 2025 with 2.1 million Fallon to prove his unreasonable cancellation. But the ratings don’t pay the bill.
Advertisers buy earnable coverage, increasingly found online. Despite his smaller TV audience, Fallon’s wider appeal on digital platforms attracted more advertisers. When advertising funds flow elsewhere, narrow victories in the narrow broadcast crowd make no sense.
Colbert led the wrong scoreboard, and CBS executives knew that.
Late-night TV also eroded itself. According to Pew’s research, CBS, NBC and ABC chase the same progressive tendency audience, splitting the three fundamental ways that have shrunk. “Last Show” never really had its audience, it shared it.
“Gutfield!” There is no such problem. As the only mainstream right-leaning comedy show, it attracted about 3.3 million viewers in the second quarter of 2025, often surpassing Colbert. It has a much worse budget and is likely the only late night show that has always been profitable.
Colbert’s guerrilla guest list (left-leaning guest with a Republican since 2022) has left no room for his base to grow.
Cable News offers the same course: ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC and CNN carved progressives, while Fox solidified the right rights and often won night viewers. The fragments killed the edge. The Fox dominates because it has an unshared lane.
All of these business failures – weak content strategies, chronic losses, hollow ratings and audience breakdowns – sit on deeper truth: Colbert’s cancellation is political, not immigrant. How audiences consume comedy, which traps the entire late night format into a dying medium.
After the 2008 financial crisis, the sniping rope surged, and iPhones and streaming apps are fostering a new generation that has never been subscribed to TV. By 2015, U.S. television subscriptions had peaked and then began a sharp, irreversible decline, according to Pew Research Data.
Audiences gather in streaming platforms, podcasts and on-demand comedy specialties, with authenticity and autonomy replacing the old night broadcast ritual. Today, late night comedy TV hosts are experiencing this whiplash of 10-year immigrants that has not yet been weakened.
In this context, the big budget, five-week variety show form is a traditional product – the typewriter in the PC world.
Poke the Orange Bear may have accelerated Colbert’s demise, but that’s just a major indicator of the greater truth: the industrial model of sustained late-night TV is collapsing, and no one else can hide it.
The famous line of the late Cambridge physicist Stephen Hawking is “intellect is the ability to adapt to change.” Faced with a rapidly growing audience landscape, Colbert and his team showed little intelligence of this adaptability.
Stephen Lile is a Strategy and Innovation Fellow at the University of Cambridge Business School. He is co-author of the forthcoming book Oxford University Press, Oxford University Press, which discusses the role of news media in misinformation and disinformation.