Stephen Colbert: “The gloves are off”

Late last week we learned that despite being the top-rated late-night show in its time slot, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will come to an end in May 2026. Despite CBS calling this a “purely financial decision”, the timing made it pretty impossible to ignore that CBS just paid out a $16 million settlement to Donald Trump to end a lawsuit against 60 Minutes, which Stephen Colbert dubbed “a big fat bribe” on air, and that parent company Paramount is mired in a stalled merger valued at $8 billion with Skydance. No matter what CBS sources say, it sure does look like they axed Colbert’s show to appease Trump and grease the wheels of their merger.

Last night, Stephen Colbert got to deliver a monologue all about the latest happenings. Well, at least someone at CBS knew they couldn’t muzzle him, too, that would probably put people into open revolt, if he’d come out and pretended everything was okay. In his monologue Colbert announced “the gloves are off”:

 

Stephen Colbert is about to enjoy ten months of unabated and wild popularity—watch him win an Emmy in a couple months—and he was already a well-liked a guy. And it’s clear he will get to say whatever he wants, which is basically the only silver lining of this situation—everyone wants to know what Colbert, who is smarter than late night TV ever knew what to do with, will do and say in his final months on CBS. John Oliver expressed this sentiment over the weekend while promoting the Erie, Pennsylvania Moon Mammoths (iykyk):

 

As for CBS, they came out over the weekend with unnamed “sources” shedding some light on their “purely financial decision”, stating that The Late Show loses “between $40 and 50 million a year”, which we’re just supposed to believe from an unnamed CBS executive. But even if true, as I pointed out last week, other late-night shows have faced financial crunches and survived—Late Night with Seth Meyers cut the house band and ended live musical performances as a cost-saving measure. The implication is that Colbert, despite being a producer on his show, did not have time to suggest similar cost-saving measures for his show (meanwhile, Paramount scraped together $300 million/year for the exclusive streaming rights to South Park, so do they have money or not?). Which begs the question why not, which brings us back to “because it’s not about the money, stupid”. 

Late-night TV IS dying, and I think over the next several years as contracts end, many if not all of these shows will go off air without replacement. But I do not for one second think 2026 would be Stephen Colbert’s death knell were it not for Donald Trump, because again, people actually tune into his show. And the fact that he does have until May 2026 says a lot about The Late Show’s value to CBS—they didn’t want to end the show before the current advertising contracts are exhausted. They just negotiated another year’s worth of ad rates back in May, they want those ad dollars. So the show loses money but also makes enough money CBS didn’t want to burn those ad contracts. Gotcha.

Jon Stewart, who worked alongside Colbert on Comedy Central for over a decade and still collaborates with him to this day, brought up the issue of value and how CBS might be permanently devaluing their brand by capitulating so cravenly to Trump. He went on an epic rant about Colbert’s firing which culminated in a gospel choir singalong. 

 

They truly have handed these guys enough fodder to dine out for the next year. But a huge question mark now hangs over Stewart’s head, too, as Comedy Central, which airs The Daily Show, is also owned by Paramount. Could he be next on the chopping block? Stewart’s contract ends in December, and I won’t be surprised if he is not renewed, even though his return to the show, even for just one night a week, has been a ratings booster. 

Notably, though, this week staff writer and correspondent Josh Johnson is hosting Tuesday through Thursday. After several years of rotating hosts, might they be testing the waters for a permanent, non-Stewart host? If so, Josh Johnson won’t be any easier on Trump. He’s grown his comedy audience exponentially by delivering weekly topical, often political standup sets on YouTube. 

His latest is a nearly hour-long set on the “Epstein crashout”:

You can watch the full thing here. While Josh Johnson has a different tone and energy than Jon Stewart, he is every bit as sharp and incisive. So even if Stewart does end up exiting The Daily Show, there’s no guarantee the new host or hosts will take a different political stance than him, assuming the show itself stays on the air. It still won’t be a pro-Trump platform, but as Stewart pointed out last night, that doesn’t even matter because Trump is now suing Rupert Murdoch, owner of Fox News, the man who did the most to get Trump elected in the first place. There isn’t enough appeasement in the world for that man, which is always the case with tyrants. I thought we learned in 1939 that appeasement doesn’t work.

Anyway, late-night TV is a mess, not only because linear TV is in its death throes and late-night programming is fading out, but because for the next ten months, the top story is always going to be that a popular host is being booted off the air to appease a thin-skinned and vindictive president. I said it before, Stephen Colbert will be fine. But the optics of this situation are terrible, and it is going to be fun for us but probably miserable for the brass at CBS to watch them eat sh-t for the next ten months as Colbert refuses to go gently into that good night.