Stephen Colbert spent $100 million a season telling half of America they were idiots.
Now the man who sat in that chair before him just explained exactly what killed it.
And what David Letterman said out loud is what CBS spent nine years pretending wasn't happening.
The Numbers CBS Couldn't Ignore
Letterman didn't dress it up.
"They don't want to spend any money, so they're going to make money," the former Late Show host told his longtime producer Barbara Gaines in a new interview.
He's right – and the math is brutal.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was burning through $100 million a season.
CBS was absorbing $40 million in annual losses just to keep the lights on at the Ed Sullivan Theater.
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Entertainment journalist Matt Belloni reported those figures on The Town podcast, calling the replacement announcement a "pretty sad moment for late night."
Sad for whom – not for the 73 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump and stopped watching Colbert years ago.
CBS is handing the time slot to Byron Allen and his Comics Unleashed – a panel comedy show Allen pays for himself.
"He sells all the advertising for his 'Comics Unleashed,'" Letterman explained, "and it'll be, I think, 90 minutes or two hours of comics talking about funny stuff."
CBS collects rent on a time slot it was hemorrhaging money to fill.
What Nine Years of Liberal Preaching Actually Built
Here's the number that explains everything.
Greg Gutfeld – on cable, with a fraction of Colbert's budget and none of his A-list guests – averaged 3.3 million viewers a night in 2025.
Colbert, on a broadcast network available in every American home, averaged 2.5 million.
A Fox News show at 10 p.m. beat the crown jewel of CBS late night.
And Colbert's demo numbers – the 18-to-49 viewers advertisers pay for – dropped 19 percent in his final year.
Johnny Carson averaged 15 million viewers in his prime.
Jay Leno was hitting five million when he handed off the Tonight Show.
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Colbert peaked at around 3.1 million viewers in 2017 – the year he made Trump the centerpiece of every monologue – then bled his audience every year after that.
Variety – not Fox News, not Breitbart – called his final season "not very good TV" and ripped the show as out of touch with everyday Americans.
The audience didn't just drift away.
They went somewhere.
The Lesson Democrats Won't Learn
Colbert made a specific bet in 2017.
He decided that mocking Trump – every night, relentlessly, with 92 percent of his political jokes targeting conservatives – was a winning business strategy.
It worked for about two years.
Then the audience that tuned in for Trump outrage got the outrage they came for and didn't need to keep watching.
The audience that didn't want the lectures stopped watching immediately.
Gutfeld figured out the thing Colbert never could: Americans don't want to be told what to think at 11:30 at night.
They want to laugh.
Gutfeld! pulled in 4.9 million viewers the night Trump appeared on the show after the Butler, Pennsylvania assassination attempt.
Colbert hadn't seen numbers like that since 2016.
Liberal critics have one explanation for what happened: Trump forced CBS to cancel the show to get the Paramount–Skydance merger approved.
That framing requires ignoring the $40 million annual loss that existed before any merger conversation.
It requires ignoring Variety saying the show wasn't good.
CBS didn't kill The Late Show to please Trump.
The audience already had.
David Letterman – no conservative – just said so out loud.
Sources:
- Alexander Hall, "David Letterman speaks out on CBS replacing Colbert's show, says network doesn't want to 'spend any money,'" Fox News, April 14, 2026.
- Matt Belloni, The Town podcast, April 2026.
- "2025 Ratings: Late-Night TV's Biggest Winners and Losers," LateNighter, January 13, 2026.
- "Gutfeld! Ruled 2025 While Two Late-Night Shows Collapsed," Hollywood in Toto, January 12, 2026.
- "CBS Ends Colbert's Late Show as Ratings Sink Amid Growing Bias Concerns," Fox News, January 3, 2026.