Samantha Bee Laments ‘Late Show’ Cancellation: “It’s Awful”
Add Samantha Bee to the list of current and former late-night hosts speaking out about CBS’ cancellation of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.
On the Breaking Bread podcast, Bee and host Tom Papa discussed the network’s decision and what led to it. Bee said she believes both CBS’ stated rationale that The Late Show is losing money, citing the current state of linear TV, and that the soon-to-close merger of CBS parent Paramount Global with Skydance — which required approval from the Trump administration — played a role.
“I think both things are true and real,” Bee told Papa. “… These legacy shows, they are hemorrhaging money, with no real end in sight. People are just not tuning in even remotely comparatively to how they used to. People are literally on their phones all the time, for one thing. They don’t need a recap of the day’s events.”
She continued, “We’re consuming news media all the time, and I do it too. … But we don’t relax in the same way by watching ‘everybody get together and lay down in your bed’ TV, and watch some jokes and some interviews. That’s true, and it’s 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.”
Bee has some experience with a show getting canceled in the wake of a merger: Her TBS late-night show Full Frontal With Samantha Bee was cut following the Warner Bros. Discovery merger (which is currently in the process of being undone), and it was on the air when AT&T and TBS parent Time Warner merged.
Papa asked if TBS executives asked her to tone down her show’s political stances, and she replied, “100 percent. When a huge corporate merger is happening, nobody wants to cause trouble. Business trumps everything … Everything you think is important is absolutely impotent. It’s not even a consideration.”
In fact, Bee said she suspects a lot of conversations about ending The Late Show among CBS and Paramount executives had to do with optics: “The extra element is it’s so much easier for them to cut [The Late Show] loose with this merger coming down the pike,” she said. “Probably the most agonizing decisions they were having were about, ’How do we float this? How do we not get a lot of blowback?’”
Bee and Colbert worked together on The Daily Show from 2003-05 before he began hosting The Colbert Report at Comedy Central. “It’s awful,” she said of the cancellation. “I know so many people who work there. I love Stephen — I consider him to be a friend. I think he’s amazing. So shocked, not surprised, I guess.”
Bee’s comments on the Late Show cancellation follow a show of support from Colbert’s fellow current late-night hosts and Late Show originator David Letterman blasting CBS and Paramount for the decision.
The full episode of Breaking Bread featuring Bee is below; the conversation about The Late Show starts about 23 minutes in.
