Weeks after word first broke that CBS had decided to cancel The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, CBS Chair of TV Media has spoken out about the unexpected cancellation. Unsurprisingly, he’s singing the same tune the network sang upon cancelling the show by doubling down on the reason for the cancellation being financially driven rather than being a direct result of Colbert’s criticism of the network and of President Donald Trump.
Speaking at a recent press conference, CBS Chair of TV Media George Cheeks was adamant that the decision to end the popular late-night show was a result a changing shift in the landscape.
“The challenge in late night is that the advertising marketplace is in significant secular decline. We are huge fans of Colbert, we love the show, unfortunately the economics made it a challenge for us to keep going.”
Interestingly, as Cheeks elaborated, he seemed to hint that the beginning of the end of Colbert’s run at The Late Show came when Taylor Tomlinson decided not to return for more After Midnight. Following the show’s second season, Tomlinson decided to step away from the franchise in order to return to stand-up touring which led to CBS’s cancellation of the show.
According to Cheeks, the decision to end After Midnight signaled to the network that perhaps they “couldn’t stay in that daypart.”
With the move away to late-night programming, Cheeks is still not yet ready to reveal what the network will replace The Late Show with, and avoided questions about what the network has planned. He also was careful not to specify exactly how much money The Late Show has been losing the network, dancing around questions of whether the reports that suggested the show had lost the network $40 million was accurate. Instead, he simply noted that the show had lost the network “tens of millions of dollars.”
As for why the network chose to announce the cancellation of The Late Show just days after Colbert called out Paramount for its $16 million settlement to President Trump, Cheeks noted that the timing was purely coincidental.
“We were at a period from a production standpoint where every year seasonally, this is [when] we negotiate new deals for writers and producers. In addition, this is going to be the third season of Colbert’s three-year deal. So, in order to do those deals, we were going to have to change the terms from what we traditionally are, September to August to September to May. It was it incumbent upon me and us to make it clear to Stephen and his reps that this is where we were,” Cheeks noted, stressing that the decision was made simply as a result of standard negotiation timelines for the show.
The statements aren’t likely to surprise fans. Regardless of whether other factors were at play in deciding to cancel The Late Show, it simply wouldn’t make sense for the network to backtrack and change up its stance.
It's highly likely that the cancellation was a result of the changing TV landscape and the need to cut costs. We just have to imagine that there was a better way to go about making the announcement as the timing of the cancellation could not have come at a worse time.
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