Comedienne Samantha Bee, who got her start on The Daily Show before moving onto her now canceled TBS show, said she understands why CBS canceled Stephen Colbert’s late-night show, admitting it hemorrhaged money.
Speaking with T0m Papa on his Breaking Bread podcast, Bee said that CBS may have had an incentive to fire Colbert amid the Paramount-Skydance merger to appease the Trump administration, but it was an incentive further fueled by his show losing $40 million dollars a year with a $100 million budget while employing 200 people.
“I think both things are true,” Bee said. “It definitely was hemorrhaging money. These legacy shows are hemorrhaging money with no real end to that — in sight, people are just not tuning in.”
“People are literally on their phones all the time for one thing, so they actually don’t necessarily need a recap of the day’s events. They’re very well-versed in what has happened,” she added.
Bee said audiences prefer to watch “people just absolutely murder each other in a South Korean game show” or “watching people fall off cliffs to relax at night before nodding off.”
Bee, however, did not dismiss the idea of a merger playing a factor, adding that her previous TBS show faced similar situations amid corporate mergers.
“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 and he cares about that stuff,” she said.
“It’s so much easier for them to cut it loose with this merger coming down the pike,” she added. “It makes the decision such a no-brainer, and probably the most agonizing decisions they were having were about how do we float this? How do we not get a lot of blowback? I’m sure they knew it was happening a long time ago.”
As Breitbart News reported this month, CBS announced the cancelation of Stephen Colbert’s show, calling it a “financial decision.”
“We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable and will retire ‘The Late Show’ franchise” in May of 2026,” executives said in a statement. “We are proud that Stephen called CBS home. He and the broadcast will be remembered in the pantheon of greats that graced late night television. This is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
The end came just days after Stephen Colbert denounced his parent company’s $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump, calling it a “big, fat bribe” for the Skydance merger. Critics of the cancelation claimed that it was a political retaliation, but evidence showed that Colbert was costing the network $40 million a year in losses while employing a full crew of 200 people. In response, President Trump celebrated the cancelation.
“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert! Greg Gutfeld is better than all of them combined, including the Moron on NBC who ruined the once great Tonight Show,” the president said.
Colbert responded to the president during and told him to “go fuck” himself.
Paul Roland Bois directed the award-winning Christian tech thriller, EXEMPLUM, which has a 100% Rotten Tomatoes critic rating and can be viewed for FREE on YouTube,Tubi, or Fawesome TV. “Better than Killers of the Flower Moon,” wrote Mark Judge. “You haven’t seen a story like this before,” wrote Christian Toto. A high-quality, ad-free rental can also be streamed on Google Play, Vimeo on Demand, or YouTube Movies. Follow him on X @prolandfilms or Instagram @prolandfilms.
