CBS is axing “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” in May 2026, the host told an audience at a taping Thursday.
The announcement came three days after Colbert spoke out against Paramount Global, parent company of CBS, settling with President Donald Trump over a “60 Minutes” story.
Colbert told the audience that he had learned the night before that “Next year will be our last season. The network will be ending the Late Show in May.”
The audience responded with boos and groans and Colbert said, “Yeah, I share your feelings.”
In his monologue on Monday night, he said he was “offended” by the $16 million settlement reached by Paramount, whose pending sale to Skydance Media needs the Trump administration’s approval.
“I don’t know if anything — anything — will repair my trust in this company,” Colbert said. “But, just taking a stab at it, I’d say $16 million would help.”
He said the technical name in legal circles for the deal was “big fat bribe.”
Paramount and CBS executives said in a statement the cancellation “is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
The most recent ratings from Nielsen show Colbert as winning his timeslot, with about 2.417 million viewers across 41 new episodes. It also said his late night show was the only one to gain viewers so far this year.
And this week, “The Late Show” was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding talk show for the sixth time. It also won a Peabody Award in 2021.
Critics of the settlement that ended Trump’s lawsuit over the “60 Minutes” editing of its interview last fall with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris suggested it was primarily to clear a hurdle to the Skydance sale.
Colbert followed “The Daily Show” host Jon Stewart’s attack of the Trump settlement a week earlier. Stewart works for Comedy Central, also owned by Paramount.
Colbert took over “The Late Show” in 2015, after becoming a big name in comedy and news satire working with Stewart on “The Daily Show” and hosting his own Comedy Central show, “The Colbert Report.”
He succeeded David Letterman, who began the show in 1993. Colbert’s 10th anniversary as host is in September.
The show has gone in a more political direction since he took it over. Alongside musicians and movie stars, Colbert often welcomes politicians to his couch.
As Colbert announced his show was ending, he had just said that Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California was one of the night’s guests.
“If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better,” Schiff said on the social platform X.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, released a similar statement, saying “America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.”
Colbert’s late-night host counterpart on ABC, Jimmy Kimmel, shared Colbert’s announcement on Instagram along with the message: “Love you Stephen. F(asterisk)(asterisk)(asterisk) you and all your Sheldons CBS.”
Kimmel used the actual expletive.
Colbert has targeted Trump for years. From 2005 to 2014, “The Colbert Report” aired a satirical riff on right-wing news talk shows.
In his first “Late Show” monologue in September 2015, he said he was beginning “the search for the real Stephen Colbert.”
His first guests were actor George Clooney and Jeb Bush, who was then struggling in his Republican primary campaign against Trump.
“Gov. Bush was the governor of Florida for eight years,” Colbert told his audience. “And you would think that that much exposure to oranges and crazy people would have prepared him for Donald Trump. Evidently not.”
Late-night TV has been facing economic pressures for year; viewership is down and many young viewers prefer highlights online, which networks have trouble monetizing. CBS also recently canceled host Taylor Tomlinson’s “After Midnight,” which aired after “The Late Show.”
But Colbert has been leading in the late-night entertainment ratings for several years. While NBC has acknowledged economic pressures by eliminating the band on Seth Meyers’ show and cutting one night of Jimmy Fallon’s “The Tonight Show,” there had been no such visible efforts at the “Late Show.”
Colbert’s relentless criticism of Trump, his denunciation of the settlement, and the parent company’s pending sale — can’t be ignored, said Bill Carter, author of “The Late Shift.”
“If CBS thinks people are just going to swallow this, they’re really deluded,” Carter said.
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AP Media Writer David Bauder contributed from New York.
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