Intro for July 18, 2025

Dear Gossips,   

I was all prepared to write about tickets for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey going on sale an entire year early—and selling out instantly—but then news broke that CBS is cancelling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. The show will run for one final season and end in May 2026, with no replacement. 

CBS isn’t just getting rid of Stephen Colbert as a late-night host, they’re ending the show altogether. 

 

This comes only days after Colbert criticized his parent company, Paramount, which owns CBS, for settling with Donald Trump over his specious lawsuit regarding a 60 Minutes interview with then-candidate Kamala Harris.

 

It is true that late-night TV is dying. Last year, Late Night with Seth Meyers removed its house band and stopped booking musical guests due to budget cuts. So when CBS calls ending The Late Show “purely a financial decision”, think about that. Think about how another late-night show was faced with a financial decision, and they took steps to lower the production cost of the show while still staying on the air. 

And don’t forget that Paramount is locked in a death spiral of a merger with Skydance which is now on its SECOND ninety-day extension to close, having been blocked until now by Trump’s FCC. They have until October 6, 2025, to close the deal. The second extension was granted just as CBS settled with Trump, now comes the announcement that Colbert will be going off the air—months before the US midterm elections next fall—thus removing one of Trump’s loudest critics from the airwaves. It’s giving big “My ‘not engaging in political quid pro quo’ shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt” energy.

Really, it IS a financial decision, it’s just a question of whose finances. It’s Shari Redstone’s financial decision as the majority owner of Paramount. It’s David Ellison’s financial decision as the CEO of Skydance, and it’s his daddy Larry Ellison’s financial decision as the underwriter of Skydance. (Larry Ellison is chummy with Trump.) It's not about the $16 million settlement or however much it costs to run Colbert’s show, it’s about the $8 billion on the line in that merger. So yeah, it is a financial decision, one made by billionaires to benefit billionaires.

I wish I could remember who said it, but last year someone joked that if Paramount and Skydance didn’t close their merger before Trump’s second inauguration, Paramount would end up having to make huge concessions to the new FCC leadership to get the deal done, they even joked about “silencing” Stephen Colbert, a thorn in Trump’s tender hide, as a gesture of goodwill to the incoming president. 

Since I can’t find that comment, here is a slightly different but related one:

As with many things happening in the political landscape right now, I don’t care who you voted for or which side of the aisle you identify with, if any, this is f-cked up. It is deeply troubling and should be worrying to everyone. You don’t have to watch or even like Stephen Colbert to worry about a television network making these kinds of concessions to appease a sensitive president who can’t handle criticism. 

This isn’t even the first time I’ve seen this happen. I’m old enough to remember Phil Donahue getting bounced off MSNBC for platforming anti-war voices in the run up to the Iraq war. At the time, MSNBC blamed it on ratings, but CBS doesn’t even have that cover because Colbert’s show is the highest rated late-night show in his time slot. Even in a dying late-night landscape, Colbert is a consistent ratings draw. He’s the one people actually tune in for, yet it’s a financial decision. IS IT?

Of course not. Just like Phil Donahue, we know why this is happening, and we know why it’s happening now. The full terms of CBS’ settlement weren’t disclosed, maybe this was part of it, or maybe it really is just a gesture of goodwill to the president so his FCC will allow the Skydance merger to proceed. Either way, I have no doubt this would not happen under a different president. This is about one man’s ego.

Stephen Colbert will be fine. I hope the 200 people who work for him land on their feet, too, but honestly, the entertainment industry is in a period of contraction, so who really knows. What I do know is that Stephen Colbert is smart, and he’s just been told he has ten months to say pretty much whatever he wants. I hope he goes on a ten-month tear, I hope he never lets up on CBS, Paramount, Shari Redstone, David and Larry Ellison, and Donald Trump. If he says something they don’t like, what are they going to do? Fire him?

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Live long and gossip,

Sarah