As we shake the dust of 2025 off our boots, we have to ask ourselves: What did we learn from that confusing clusterfuck of a year? What lessons can be derived from those chaotic twelve months, so that the whole messy ordeal isn’t just written off as a perplexing, pointless quagmire? It’s a massive question, big enough that we can hopefully be excused for turning to our TV luminaries to help draw a bit of advice, maybe even a life lesson, from the wreckage. Hey, Stephen Colbert, what did 2025 teach you?
“Don’t trust billionaires.” That was how the still-there-for-now CBS host kicked off the year, drawing headlines for his cheerful response when a typically soused Anderson Cooper and Andy Cohen asked him a few nights ago—amidst their usual New Year’s Eve duties for CNN—what he’d learned from a year that saw him suddenly on the verge of losing his late night show. “They don’t get rich by finding that money on the side of the road, brother!”
Colbert managed to end up having arguably the second-worst 2025 in late night TV, by dint of not actually being dragged off the air for a week by affiliate owners whipped into a frenzy by the FCC. But he’s still set to lose the Late Show pulpit that’s been his TV home for a decade at this point, after CBS abruptly announced it’d be canceling his series at the end of its 2025-2026 season. A lot of people have asked if the decision wasn’t related to Colbert’s years-long criticism of the Trump administration in general—and Paramount’s willingness to give them a lot of money to make pesky lawsuits go away amidst the heated frenzy of merger season in specific—even as the network swore it was strictly a financial decision. Colbert, who tends to come off pretty even-keeled when he’s not playing up his personas, has said in interviews that he doesn’t think it’s “fruitful” to vent his feelings about any of it in public.
But, hey, you can’t always be fruitful, right? There’s some real cathartic joy in watching Colbert (obliquely) lay into any Redstones, Ellisons, or other oligarchs who might be listening, cheerfully laughing with Cohen and Cooper as he reminds viewers not to trust the billionaire class. If nothing else, it’s a pretty solid mantra to internalize, bringing it forward into whatever new clusterfuck 2026 is sure to contain.
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