this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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Colbert lost 10% of his audience in Q1 2024, so losses were mounting. There is less of a business case for late night.
CBS didn’t fire Colbert this year either. They decided not to renew his contract, which ends at the end the 2025/6 season. If they’d fired him, there would likely be large penalty clauses involved. What they did do earlier was decide not to fill the post-Colbert slot when their previous show ended, signalling a general move away from late-night.
That's nitpicking. They decided they didn't want him to work for them anymore, thus they fired him. Just because you couch it in different terms doesn't make it any less true. Them doing it at a slightly less inconvenient time for them doesn't mean it was any less of a firing.
I get calling it nitpicking to split hairs about when Colbert was fired, even if justified financially (obviously firing someone when there is a contractual penalty isn't the best business sense), but what are your thoughts on the last sentence the OP made? Yeah, Colbert was fired, whether he was fired today or two weeks ago it's till fired, but the network also choosing to not fill other unaffiliated and vacant late night slots does seem to give credence to the idea that they might just be trying to get away from late night shows.
I wouldn't be surprised if that's part of it, but by no means is that all, or even necessarily most of it. There are far too many factors to pin it down to just one, and that one's a relatively minor one. Even if he's losing numbers, he's still a big draw. There'd have to be a lot of other major factors for them to drop him so suddenly.
That's fair.
it’s not nitpicking. it directly relates to this point in the top comment:
they made the same decision this year as they did last year, not to renew his contract. also as mentioned maybe the cost of breaking the contract was more than they were expecting to lose.
There's been an across-the-board decline in advertisement spending nationally. A lot of media is effectively operating as a loss-leader for the tech sector, which is why you see so many dogshit Op-Eds and bizarre headline beats pumping MAG7 and their affiliates in the face of huge economic headwinds.
There's some speculation that they purchased South Park with the intention of filling the Late Night slot with a much cheaper form of animated comedy. In some sense, its two-birds and one-stone. Get rid of an expensive live action comedy performance to appease the dictator's FCC Chairman. Then line up a show so far over-the-top critical of Trump that you can't reasonably be accused of pro-Trump bias, but that doesn't go live until after the mid-terms.
Play both ends against the middle. Then slop-ify your network with AI generated Skydance action movies for the MAGA folks and discount dipshit fart-comedy for the apathetic liberals.
Still trying to figure out if this is a Matt Stone pun...