On a recent episode of SiriusXM’s Andy Cohen Live, the Watch What Happens Live host cast doubt on the network’s purported financial motivation in a new way. Citing Matt Belloni’s claim on Puck News that The Late Show was losing more than $40 million a year for CBS, Cohen suggested that even if this was 100% true, it’s still not how he would expect the network to proceed. “I think it is possible that it’s losing money and typically what would happen if a show is losing money that is also super important to the network… and the late night time slot has been important to CBS for the last 25 years since Letterman began it on CBS at the Ed Sullivan Theater in like the mid-nineties, what they would probably do is say, ‘Listen, Stephen, your show is losing X amount of money a year. There’s two things we could do. We could cut the budget in half, maybe move out of the Ed Sullivan Theater, do the show in a small studio that we already own,’ because CBS has a lot of studio space,” Cohen explained.
Another, less dire option than canceling the show, he continued, would have been to cut down on staff. “‘You have 200 people working here. We need it to be 100 people or 60 and instead of you doing your show five days a week, we’re gonna do your show four days a week and you’re gonna pre-tape your Thursday show, so you’re actually gonna be in production three days a week,'” he said, impersonating a CBS exec. “That’s a way right there to cut the budget at least in half… as opposed to saying out of nowhere, as he portrayed it, they called him in and said, ‘Your show’s losing money. We’re canceling it in a year.'”
Other observers have come down on a different side. After digging into the financials, Belloni wrote, “For now, I cautiously (and skeptically) believe that this was mostly an economic decision.” Variety also published its own deep dive, which points out that “TV networks have been cutting costs at their late-night mainstays for the past few years,” including, recently, CBS itself, when it opted to cancel fellow late night program After Midnight instead of finding a new leader when prior host Taylor Tomlinson announced her departure. The trade’s sources also note that CBS and Colbert have never had a “tense” relationship, a state of affairs reinforced by the fact that the host isn’t being pulled off air completely, and is instead being allowed to continue his show for another 10 months. Speaking of timing, Variety‘s report also posits that CBS was in a tough spot due to the nature of late night contracts. Typically, late night staffers sign contracts around this time through August of the following year. In the trade’s view, CBS would have known that the news would leak if those contracts only extended through May 2026—when the final Late Show episode is supposed to air—but didn’t want to pull the show without talking to Colbert in-person first, which it couldn’t do while he was on vacation. If all of this is true, the network would have only had a short window to announce the news, despite the terrible optics.
Still, Cohen is skeptical. “They’re turning the lights out completely at 11:30, which says to me, it’s like CBS is just cooked,” he said. “It is cooked. They are saying, ‘We are done.'”
