Samantha Bee is not convinced that Paramount decided to end The Late Show only to please Donald Trump, saying Tuesday that Stephen Colbert’s show was “hemorrhaging money.”
“It’s so much easier for them to cut it loose with this merger coming down the pike,” Bee said on the Breaking Bread with Tom Papa podcast. “It makes the decision such a no-brainer,” she added. “These legacy shows, they are hemorrhaging money with no real end to that 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, so they actually don’t necessarily need a recap of the day’s events. They’re very well-versed in what has happened.”
Bee went on to say that people would “really rather watch people just absolutely murder each other in a South Korean game show” before “nodding off” at night.
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Bee can relate, after all. Her own late night show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, was canceled before its eighth season in 2022 as the show’s network TBS was merged into Warner Bros. Discovery. CBS’ statement that ending Late Show was a “purely financial decision” echoed TBS’ at the time, which called ending Full Frontal a “difficult, business-based decision” amid the merger.
Despite outcry over the timing of CBS’ announcement that Late Show would end in May 2026—just days after Colbert called out the network’s parent company for its “big, fat bribe” settlement to Trump and just days before the company was set to seal its $8 billion merger with Skydance with his administration’s approval—reports emerged that the program was apparently losing CBS $40 million a year.
Still, the timing of the decision prompted Democratic lawmakers like Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Adam Schiff to call for an investigation into whether the decision was made in order to draw favor from Trump ahead of the FCC’s approval of the merger. Trump gloated on social media when Late Show was canceled, and later said he “hopes” he plays a part in getting more of his late-night critics off the air.
And yet, Bee said the writing’s been on the wall for the end to the traditional late-night format for a while. The fact that Trump is happy just made the choice a win-win for Paramount, she said. “Both things are true... Probably the most agonizing decisions they were having were about, ‘How do we float this? Like, ‘How do we not get a lot of blowback?’ I’m sure they knew it was happening a long time ago.”
But even though the end of Late Show seemed inevitable, Bee still called the news “awful.”
“I love Stephen. I consider him to be a friend,” Bee, who worked with Colbert as a correspondent on The Daily Show, said. “I think he’s amazing… I think probably Stephen’s in hell right now because when you have a staff of 200 people… you can’t take all those people with you to your next adventure. And that’s just a lot of people who have built lives around a steady paycheck. It’s really, really awful.”
For more, listen to Samantha Bee on The Last Laugh podcast.
