When The Late Show goes off-air next May, CBS won’t just be saying goodbye to Stephen Colbert, it’ll be bidding farewell to late-night comedy talk shows in general, the comedian told viewers this week. That means no more celebrity guests, live bands, or monologues for the first time since a beardless David Letterman hit CBS airwaves in 1993.

The cancellation left some scratching their heads. Colbert’s audience was growing, he often beat his late-night rivals in the ratings, and the show was regularly being nominated for awards. So why did CBS break out the giant stage hook?

The sun might be setting on late night

The genre is expensive to produce, and overall, audiences have been shrinking.

• Between 2018 and 2024, ad revenue from network late-night shows dropped 50%, CNN reported, citing estimates from ad data firm Guideline.
• Insiders told CNN that Colbert’s show was losing money and didn’t have a path to stop doing so.

CBS insists the decision had nothing to do with performance or content, calling it “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.”

A closer look at Paramountal activity

Not everyone is buying the CBS explanation. That’s because days before the announcement, Colbert lambasted the network’s owner, Paramount Global, for paying $16 million to settle a lawsuit filed by President Trump over the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with VP Kamala Harris before the 2024 election.

Colbert, a longtime Trump critic, likened the settlement to a “big fat bribe,” since Paramount needs the Trump administration to sign off on its merger with Skydance Media.

• Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff both called for transparency into whether the show was canceled for political reasons.
• The Writers Guild of America asked New York Attorney General Letitia James to investigate whether Paramount gave into political pressure.

CBS denies that The Late Show’s cancellation had anything to do with the merger. But President Trump celebrated the firing, saying Colbert’s “talent was even less than his ratings.”

As for the future? Late-night shows could be entering a period of mourning, and even though cancellations may save networks some money, that still leaves them with a big problem: how to get people to stop watching Netflix.—BC

Chevron closes $53b Hess deal after vanquishing Exxon’s legal challenge. Big Oil got a little bit bigger yesterday when Chevron closed its acquisition of its smaller rival Hess, securing access to coveted oil reserves off the shore of Guyana. Chevron and Hess struck the deal back in 2023, but Exxon brought a legal challenge to block it in the biggest oil feud since somebody shot JR. Exxon claimed Hess was contractually obligated to offer to sell Exxon its stake in a Guyana development the companies operate in partnership with the China National Offshore Oil Corp. before making another deal, but yesterday arbitrators from the International Chamber of Commerce in Paris denied that claim. Chevron quickly wrapped up the deal with Hess a few hours later.

Netflix used generative AI in one of its shows for the first time. Will the next Squid Game be made by a bot? Probably not, but tucked into Netflix’s earnings announcement this week was the nugget that the streaming giant has seemingly picked the pro-AI side in Hollywood’s battle over the tech. Netflix said the Argentine sci-fi show The Eternaut was the first show it had produced that used fully AI-generated shots. The tech enabled a sequence that included the collapse of a building in Buenos Aires, which would have otherwise been outside the show’s budget. “We remain convinced that AI represents an incredible opportunity to help creators make films and series better, not just cheaper,” Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos told analysts.