Sean Rameswaram

Why in the world is CBS killing off the most popular show in late night?

Lucas Shaw

Colbert is the highest rated of the late-night shows. But when he debuted, he got [6.6 million] viewers. The average now is more like 2 [million]. And the amount of advertising dollars pumping into late night has dropped by more than 50%. It's a declining part of the business.

Broadcast networks have been looking for ways to cut costs…And Colbert, as successful as he's been on linear television, is also sort of the least web-forward of the late-night shows. He has the smallest footprint online of any of the hosts.

Sean Rameswaram

And then there’s the White House-shaped elephant in the room.

Lucas Shaw

Trump has called on companies to basically fire all the late-night hosts. The timing certainly didn't look good for Paramount: You know, CBS announced it was killing the show while Paramount was in the middle of negotiating or finalizing its merger with Skydance, and the FCC had been dragging its feet to approve that deal. Trump was suing CBS over the editing of the 60 Minutes interview [with Kamala Harris]. Trump said that those facts were unrelated. Nobody really believed him. The Ellison family, which now owns CBS, is super tight with Trump. 

So there's been this perception that Donald Trump and politics had a big role in the firing of Stephen Colbert…[though] we have not seen any smoking gun. 

Sean Rameswaram

Have we seen any indication that this is gonna be a trend? Is Seth Meyers shaking in his shorts? Is Kimmel ready to throw the towel in?

Lucas Shaw

We haven't seen any indication that any of those hosts are getting canceled. That said, I wouldn't be surprised if one or two of them lost their jobs in the next couple of years. Kimmel, for instance, recently got in a lot of trouble with Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr, and some of the local station groups that carry ABC tried to take him off the air. That ended up backfiring. Kimmel has become a sort of free speech warrior and re-upped his deal for another year. 

But if you're Disney and if you're the new CEO Josh D’Amaro, do you want your late-night show to constantly be causing you problems with the president? Especially if it's a show that doesn't make much money. So I think there's a very interesting Kimmel negotiation to come. I assume Seth Meyers is on borrowed time. My gut tells me that Fallon will be the last to go, but that's just a hunch. 

Sean Rameswaram

We'll all be dead and gone, and Jimmy Fallon will still be there looking like he's 35, throwing to Questlove, playing games. 

Lucas Shaw

And the games are the thing. Late night became all about formats — it became about how you can get something that's going to go viral on YouTube, something that people are going to share with their friends. Because the number of people who are actually watching the shows live kept going down and down.

A lot of the hosts have been pretty open about the fact that much of what they do now is geared towards online virality. Which is great for the customer, but not so good for the networks, because you make a lot less money from a YouTube clip than you do from a 30-second spot on CBS. 

Sean Rameswaram

Can you help people understand what they might see if they turn CBS on at 11:30 now?

Lucas Shaw

Well…how familiar are you with the name Byron Allen? He's got one of the more unusual CVs in media. He was a standup comedian in the '80s and '90s. Then he decided he wanted to use his money to become a media mogul. The biggest deal he’s done to date was for the Weather Channel. [Editor’s note: This month Allen also bought a majority stake in BuzzFeed, becoming its CEO.]

He’s buying Colbert’s time slot. He's essentially paying CBS to put his show on the air. He put in a show called Comics Unleashed, and another Allen show called Funny You Should Ask will slot into the spot after [Colbert’s] that used to be James Cordon’s. He's betting that he can make enough money from advertising sales that the millions of dollars it costs to buy those slots will be worth it. 

CBS executives have said anonymously that they were losing like $40 million a year on Colbert. Now, some people don't believe that number. But if you can go from losing $40 million a year to potentially making tens of millions of dollars a year from Byron Allen — why wouldn't you do that trade? 

Sean Rameswaram

What do we lose when we no longer have these traditional late-night shows? 

Lucas Shaw

On the one hand, what you see with the loss of late night is the decline of monoculture. When the late-night shows started, most people watched CBS, NBC, ABC, and later, Fox. Then cable came, and then, with the internet, things just got more and more fragmented. 

I think part of what made the late-night shows special was that they were some of the only places to hear and see from the most famous people in the world. But that's obviously gone away. And the closest thing to late night we have now are podcasts and YouTube.