By Joe Flint

CBS is pulling the plug on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" -- and on the entire late-night franchise.

The network said the show would end in May, when host Stephen Colbert's current contract expires. Colbert announced the news to the audience attending the taping for Thursday night's show and posted the message on social media.

He said he found out Wednesday night that CBS would end the show in May. The news was met with boos and catcalls from the audience.

"Yeah, I share your feelings," he responded to the crowd. "This is all just going away."

CBS said the cancellation isn't related in any way to the show's performance, its content or other matters happening at parent company Paramount Global. It was "purely a financial decision," the network said.

Paramount is trying to close a sale of the company to Skydance Media that is still awaiting approval from the Federal Communications Commission.

Colbert praised CBS for its support of the show since he took the helm as host, executive producer and writer in 2015. He said 200 people work on the show.

Colbert has been a regular critic of President Trump, and he also has taken jabs at his own network and parent company over the years.

In his monologue Monday, Colbert criticized Paramount for its agreement to pay $16 million to settle a lawsuit with Trump over a "60 Minutes" interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris.

"I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles," he said Monday. "It's a big fat bribe."

The Wall Street Journal has reported that Paramount executives were concerned about legal liability from making a deal and the optics of settling the suit while pushing the Skydance deal through federal review.

Colbert has been hosting the show since David Letterman, the first "Late Show" host, stepped down in 2015. CBS launched "The Late Show" in 1993 after it wooed Letterman away from NBC, where he had lost a competition with Jay Leno to succeed Johnny Carson as host of "The Tonight Show."

Most late-night shows on broadcast and cable television no longer command the ratings or advertising dollars they once did, making the economics of the shows -- which can include live bands and theater spaces -- tough to justify.

Colbert's show on CBS as well as NBC's "The Tonight Show" starring Jimmy Fallon and ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live" have cut back to four original shows a week in recent years.

Colbert's is the most-watched broadcast network show in his time slot, with an average nightly audience of just under 2.5 million viewers per episode this season, according to data from Nielsen.

The decision to end the show came from senior CBS executives and wasn't something that Skydance had a say in, a person close to that company said.

Write to Joe Flint at Joe.Flint@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 17, 2025 21:09 ET (01:09 GMT)

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