This is not my choice. So I don\u2019t know how we\u2019re going to land this plane, but people have asked me, \u201cWell, what do you think you\u2019re going to do next?\u201d And the cleanest and really fullest answer I can give you, not that I don\u2019t have thoughts, is, the honest answer is, I just want to land this plane gracefully in a way that I find satisfying, given how much effort we\u2019ve put into it for the last 10 years. That\u2019s a long answer. You want shorter answers or is that okay?<\/p>\n
No, I love a longer answer. This is real life. So when they called you and told you\u2014<\/p>\n
They didn\u2019t call me and tell me! My manager told me.<\/p>\n
No one called you?<\/p>\n
No. They told him. They told him, and he told me. He said, \u201cHey, do you have 15 minutes? I\u2019m going to stop by.\u201d And I said, \u201cSure.\u201d So I got off and I said to my assistant, I said, \u201cBaby Doll\u201d\u2014because my manager is James \u201cBaby Doll\u201d Dixon\u2014\u201cBaby Doll wants 15 minutes in person?\u201d Usually, like, five minutes on the phone is an hour with him. And I said, \u201cI\u2019m super tired, I\u2019m really exhausted. Just make sure this doesn\u2019t go too long.\u201d So when 15 minutes comes by, my assistant texted me. I said, \u201cIt might be a little longer.\u201d I was so tired. I was lying down on my couch with a pillow over my eyes going, \u201cHey, James, what\u2019s going on?\u201d I was prone. And he said, \u201cThis is going to be the last season.\u201d So I sat up and was like, \u201cOh, okay. Well, that\u2019s interesting. I did not expect that.\u201d And then we talked for hours. Because you don\u2019t have that moment very often. And then I went home and my wife, who was expecting me home in 15 minutes, and she said, \u201cThat was two and a half hours.\u201d She goes, \u201cWhat happened? Did you get canceled?\u201d And I said, \u201cYep.\u201d So we sat down, she got me a drink, and we sat and talked about like, \u201cOkay, what do you want to do next?\u201d That was it.<\/p>\n
Did the explanation provided to your manager make sense to you? What was it?<\/p>\n
That they\u2019re getting out of the late-night space altogether because it\u2019s no longer profitable for the network. And I said, \u201cWell, if we can\u2019t be, then no one can be.\u201d And look, they run the business and I run the show, and far be it for me to tell them how to run their business, but I\u2019ll stick with: I found it very surprising.<\/p>\n
And did you find what they said plausible? Do you believe it?<\/p>\n
Television\u2019s in huge trouble. Maybe David Ellison [CEO of Paramount Skydance] will fix everything. No, no. Seriously. Maybe he will. Maybe he\u2019ll fix everything. But it\u2019s clear that television is in a lot of transitions. It\u2019s been going on for a long time. But that\u2019s not my end of the business. My end of the business is the jokes.<\/p>\n
If I have the sequence of events correct, CBS\u2019s parent company, Paramount, pays President Donald Trump a settlement of $16 million, which you call the bribe on air, and then\u2014<\/p>\n
Please don\u2019t get me a lawsuit here. I said, \u201cI believe that there is a name for that. And it would be: big fat bribe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shortly after that the show is canceled.<\/p>\n
Two days later.<\/p>\n
And immediately, politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff come out and say words to the effect of: If this was politically motivated, the American people deserve to know.<\/p>\n
By the way, everything you\u2019re telling me right now, you have to tell me right now. I don\u2019t
read about myself. Who\u2019d you say?<\/p>\n
Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren.<\/p>\n
Well, good for them. I mean, that\u2019s not my job. That\u2019s not my reaction to it. My reaction as a professional in show business is to go: That is the network\u2019s decision. I can understand why people would have that reaction because CBS or the parent corporation\u2014I\u2019m not going to say who made that decision, because I don\u2019t know; no one\u2019s ever going to tell us\u2014decided to cut a check for $16 million to the president of the United States over a lawsuit that their own lawyers, Paramount\u2019s own lawyers, said is completely without merit. And it is self-evident that that is damaging to the reputation of the network, the corporation, and the news division. So it is unclear to me why anyone would do that other than to curry favor with a single individual. If people have theories that associate me with that, it\u2019s a reasonable thing to think, because CBS or the corporation clearly did it once. But my side of the street is clean and I have no interest in picking up a broom or adding to refuse on the other side of the street. Not my problem. So people can have their theories. I have my feelings about not doing the show anymore, but you\u2019d have to show me why that\u2019s a fruitful relationship for me to have with my network for the next nine months, for me to engage in that speculation. I have had a great relationship with CBS. It\u2019s one of the reasons why this was so surprising and so shocking that there was no preamble to this. We do budgets and everything like that. We\u2019ve done cuts and stuff like that. So that\u2019s why it was surprising to me, as I said, but I meant what I said [on air] the next night after I found out, because I couldn\u2019t sit on it. They\u2019ve been great partners. They really have. They\u2019ve been very supportive. It took us six to nine months to find our legs. Even before people watched the show, we didn\u2019t quite figure out what we wanted to do. It didn\u2019t come fully assembled out of the box the way The Colbert Report did. And they stood by us and they were very supportive and they gave us what we needed and we found it and we delivered for them what we wanted. I want to do a good job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This is not my choice. So I don\u2019t know how we\u2019re going to land this plane, but people…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":115743,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[2396,156,4974,82399,111,139,69,1248,2795,437],"class_list":{"0":"post-115742","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-culture","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-magazine","11":"tag-men-of-the-year","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-onecolumn","16":"tag-textbelowcentergridwidth","17":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115742"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115742\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/115743"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}