Colbert’s Replacement Draws Far Fewer Viewers, Yet CBS Still Claims Victory

After CBS announced in July 2025 that it would end Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, U.S. President Donald Trump celebrated online, saying he was “very pleased” that Colbert was fired and mocking his talent and ratings. Now that the show filling Colbert’s slot, Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen, is drawing sharply lower audiences, Trump has said nothing, even though the move is tied to the same broader media and political environment.

CBS said the cancellation was financial, arguing that the show was losing money, losing viewers and losing advertisers. The network made the decision after airing The Late Show since 1993, with David Letterman hosting until 2015 and Colbert afterward. The timing also followed Colbert’s pointed criticism of CBS, and came amid the network’s $16 million settlement with Trump over a 60 Minutes lawsuit connected to an interview with Kamala Harris, which Colbert said was really meant to help clear the way for Skydance’s planned purchase of Paramount, CBS’s parent company.

The numbers, however, tell a mixed story. Colbert’s final Late Show drew 6.7 million viewers, the program’s highest-ever audience. The next day, Allen’s show drew fewer than 1 million viewers, an 85 percent drop from Colbert’s finale and about 65 percent below Colbert’s usual average. When rival channels returned with fresh episodes on June 1, Allen’s audience fell further, to 628,000.

Allen dismisses the comparison, saying the finale was an unusually inflated benchmark. In a Guardian interview last week, he said, “There is nothing like this show on television,” describing a format built around five comedians and a rule against political humor, racism, sexism, antisemitism and homophobia. Critics, including John Oliver, have mocked the show, and reviewers at The Guardian have been harsh. Even so, CBS says moving the show into Colbert’s slot turned a $40 million annual loss into a $15 million profit.

Allen, who owns the time slot and sells the ads himself under a special CBS deal, argues that ratings are no longer the main measure of value in late night. The media entrepreneur, whose Allen Media Group now employs about 2,000 people and recently bought a controlling stake in BuzzFeed for $120 million, says he is building the world’s biggest media company.