The Colbert Retort

In case you haven't heard — I just did from Stu Shostak — CBS is getting out of the late night business and terminating Stephen Colbert's late night show as of next May. They're saying this is a purely financial decision and I have no reason to doubt that even though Colbert currently has the most-watched of all the late night shows. But that species of show has become less and less profitable over the last decade or two. That's why they tried replacing James Corden not with another late night host but with something much cheaper…and then they decided to dump even that. All the regular broadcast networks are cutting and slashing expensive programming. It's just the way the business has been going for some time.

Colbert will do fine. His managers are probably cackling now at the kind of offers he's likely to get. If I ran HBO or one of those networks, I'd offer him a check with a lot of digits on it to do a completely uncensored — live, even — version of the kind of show he's been doing. He may not want that. He's such a versatile guy and a talk show only taps into some of what he can do so he may want to do something else.

And that's about as far as I've thought this thing through as of right now. It's kind of shocking, I know, but we're going to see CBS, NBC and ABC all remake themselves over the next few years so there will be more such shocks.