CBS’s stated reason for canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was that the show was losing them $40 million a year. Critics predisposed to think the world revolves around Donald Trump were hostile and outright dismissive of that, but on Thursday CBS came out with more specifics that argued that their new arrangement with Bryon Allen has netted them $55 million.
CBS was also under pressure because critics were pointing out that Allen’s Comics Unleashed brought in an underwhelming 878,000 total viewers on the night after Colbert’s finale. The Late Show had averaged 2.14 million prior to the finale of 6.74 million, according to Deadline.
Defending themselves in a statement, CBS said, “We’re proud to partner with Byron Allen on a new business and programming model for late night that proactively addresses a network daypart that was cost prohibitive to continue. With this ‘time buy’ model, we have shifted an hour that was losing roughly $40 million annually to $15 million in profit — a $55 million swing.”
In other words, Allen is paying CBS, not the other way around. Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva summarizes, “Allen is paying $15 million a year as a ‘time buy,’ meaning that he is leasing the 11:30 PM hour from CBS and selling its ad inventory himself in search of profit. That is a flat fee for the network not contingent on the show’s performance (which would impact Allen’s ad rates).”
By contrast, when it came to Colbert, Andreeva pointed out that since, “The Late Show was produced by CBS Studios, so the company shouldered 100% of the production cost amid an ad revenue declines across all entertainment programming on linear, with late-night’s drop among the steepest, said to be 65% over the past 6 years.”
While it is technically possible that CBS is overstating the $55 million swing because the 11:35 time slot Colbert occupied does not exist in isolation, even critics of CBS and their math have had to concede, “There is a real argument that the traditional model no longer works.”
Before CBS announced it was canceling The Late Show, that was widely understood, but the desire to make everything about Trump has contributed to the demise of both late night and common sense.
