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Canceled late-night host Samantha Bee admitted Tuesday that Stephen Colbert’s late-night show “hemorrhaging” money and viewers is the main reason it’s getting canceled.
Bee, whose TBS late-night program, “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee,” was canceled in 2022, reacted to CBS announcing the end of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” on the “Breaking Bread with Tom Papa” podcast.
“You know, these legacy shows, like they are hemorrhaging money with no real end to that in sight,” she told the host, comedian Tom Papa.
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CBS announced earlier this month that it would cancel “The Late Show” next May at the end of its broadcast season, clarifying that the cancellation was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.”
A report from Puck News journalist Matt Belloni revealed that Colbert’s show lost “more than $40 million a year.”
Many prominent liberals and Democratic figures have speculated the network had cut the show for political reasons, a notion both Papa and Bee said could be the case, but they also admitted that the show was a financial drain that no one was watching.
Papa said, “I mean the show loses $40 million a year.”
“Yep,” Bee replied.
“So that’s a reality,” the host said. Bee agreed: “That’s a reality.”
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“The parent company is trying to curry favor with the president. So that’s a reality,” he added.
Bee replied, “Yeah, I think both things are true. I think both things are just true and real. Like it definitely was hemorrhaging money.”
Papa agreed and Bee continued, saying that “legacy shows” like Colbert’s and other late-night hosts’ are floundering financially.
She then went on to note that people are not watching these shows like they used to.
“People are just not tuning in remotely, comparatively to how they used to. Well, people are literally on their phones all the time for one thing, so they don’t necessarily need a recap of the day’s events. They’re very well-versed in what has happened,” Bee added.
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Referencing the popular Netflix thriller “Squid Games,” Bee quipped that people would “really rather watch like people just absolutely murder each other in a South Korean game show – just like watching people fall off cliffs to relax at night before nodding off.”
Elsewhere, Bee mentioned how President Donald Trump having to sign off on a merger between CBS’s parent company, Paramount, and Skydance, probably exerted some pressure on the network to do something about Colbert, whose show is very anti-Trump.
“It is also true that when the president of the United States has to give his sign-off on a corporate merger, the thing you can’t do is make jokes about him. He’s a thin-skinned idiot. And we know, he’s like a pernicious cancer.”
For that reason as well, she told Papa it was a “no-brainer” that the network decided to let Colbert’s show go.
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