CBS Boss Speaks out on ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ Cancellation

Plenty of people have spoken out about the cancellation of CBS’s The Late Show With Stephen Colbert—from fans to fellow late night hosts to Colbert himself—but there hasn’t been much talk from the company itself. Until now.

George Cheeks, recently named Chair of TV Media at Paramount after the company’s merger with Skydance, spoke on the series’ cancellation in a press conference.

“The challenge in late night is that the advertising marketplace is in significant secular decline,” Cheeks said. “We are huge fans of Colbert, we love the show, unfortunately the economics made it a challenge for us to keep going.”

He also said that after Taylor Tomlinson declined to continue hosting late-night series After Midnight, which took the timeslot of The Late Late Show with James Corden, it was clear the network needed to be done with late-night programming and “couldn’t stay in that daypart.”

“I know [Skydance] is going to invest, but they’re going to invest cautiously and wisely, so for me, managing this business is really important for me to double down [in] primetime and sports,” he said.

He wouldn’t confirm how much money the series was losing, even after rumors emerged that the network was losing $40 million annually on The Late Show, but did confirm it was “significant” and “tens of millions of dollars.”

“At the end of the day, it just wasn’t sustainable to continue,” he said.

Cheeks added that it’s “too early to speculate” what will fill in the timeslot occupied by The Late Show, and the series getting cancelled at this exact moment just came down to timing of new contracts for the series’ workers.

“We were at a period from a production standpoint where every year seasonally, this is [when] we negotiate new deals for writers and producers. In addition, this is going to be the third season of Colbert’s three-year deal. So, in order to do those deals, we were going to have to change the terms from what they traditionally are, September to August to September to May. It was incumbent upon me and us to make it clear to Stephen and his reps that this is where we were,” he said.