{"id":701661,"date":"2026-05-29T13:59:10","date_gmt":"2026-05-29T13:59:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/701661\/"},"modified":"2026-05-29T13:59:10","modified_gmt":"2026-05-29T13:59:10","slug":"cbs-says-its-making-55-million-by-dumping-colbert-for-byron-allen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/701661\/","title":{"rendered":"CBS says it’s making $55 million by dumping Colbert for Byron Allen"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since the beginning<\/a>, CBS has been adamant that its decision to cancel Stephen Colbert\u2019s\u00a0Late Show\u00a0had nothing to do with politics, and everything to do with money\u2014and not just the cash it tossed to the Trump administration, in a move Colbert denounced days before his cancellation was announced, to smooth over Paramount\u2019s then-upcoming acquisition by David Ellison\u2019s Skydance. It\u2019s a position of stated pure economic self-interest that\u2019s now continued past the lifespan of Late Show\u00a0itself, as the network issued a statement tonight saying that it\u2019s essentially made itself a sweet $55 million by dumping Colbert\u2019s show.<\/p>\n

That includes (per\u00a0Deadline<\/a>), removing from its balance sheets the $40 million a year it was losing running Late Show, a long-rumored number that CBS has now stated in an on-the-record fashion. (Whether people believe it, or, like Colbert\u2019s predecessor Dave Letterman did in a recent New York Times\u00a0interview<\/a>, declare the network \u201clying weasels,\u201d is, of course, left up to the individual.) On the other side of the spreadsheet, meanwhile, is the amount the network is getting paid for leasing out<\/a> Colbert\u2019s old timeslot to recent Buzzfeed buyer<\/a> Byron Allen, for his Comics Unleashed<\/a>: A hefty $15 million.<\/p>\n

Notably, that money arrives free of any issues like \u201cratings\u201d or \u201cperformance,\u201d since Allen\u2019s \u201ctime buy\u201d model means getting money out of advertisers for the hour is his problem, not CBS\u2019s\u2014which collects its flat fee regardless of how Allen\u2019s show does. (Which is probably good, given that Comics Unleashed\u00a0instantly more than halved Colbert\u2019s average viewership numbers when it took over the slot, bringing in about a million viewers, as opposed to Colbert\u2019s 2.7 million average watchers during his final 2026 run.) But who needs viewers, or the prestige of taking part in the late night tradition, or even just putting out TV that people actually enjoy, when you can have $55 million, instead, right? (Okay, we started that sentence kind of sarcastically, but we would\u00a0like $55 million. Damn, these purely financial decisions are pretty rough!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Since the beginning, CBS has been adamant that its decision to cancel Stephen Colbert\u2019s\u00a0Late Show\u00a0had nothing to do…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":701662,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[49,48,75],"class_list":["post-701661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701661","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=701661"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/701661\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/701662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=701661"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=701661"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=701661"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}