CBS Finally Pulls the Plug on Colbert’s Tired Trump Routine After Losing Millions

After what felt like an eternity of mind-numbing political sermonizing masquerading as comedy, CBS is finally putting “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” out of its misery. The network was reportedly hemorrhaging around $40 million per year on the show, a staggering figure that somehow seems conservative given the painful quality of what aired nightly. You know what? That number should surprise people more than it does, but when you understand the economics of late night television and the astronomical salaries involved, it starts making sense in the worst possible way.

How does a show lose that much money? Start with Colbert’s likely eight-figure salary to deliver the same “Orange Man Bad” punchline every single night for years. Then add the salaries for an entire writers’ room whose job apparently consisted of scrolling Twitter for the day’s Trump outrage and turning it into a monologue. The formula was so predictable you could set your watch by it. Trump did something. Colbert makes a face. Audience claps. Repeat for an hour. That’s not comedy. That’s partisan cheerleading with a laugh track.

The truth is that Colbert stopped being funny the moment he decided to become a full-time political activist with a CBS platform. His earlier work on “The Colbert Report” had bite and creativity, even if you disagreed with his politics. He played a character. He took risks. He surprised you. But “The Late Show” version of Colbert was just exhausting. Night after night of the same tired routine, preaching to a choir that kept getting smaller because even they got bored.

Outside of the show’s employees and the Hollywood bubble dwellers who’ll watch anything that portrays conservatives as villains, nobody’s going to miss this show. Think about that for a second. When Johnny Carson left, people mourned. When David Letterman retired, it felt like the end of an era. But Colbert’s cancellation? It’s more like finally putting down a lame horse. There are no iconic sketches people will remember. No viral moments that defined the cultural conversation, unless you count that absolutely cringeworthy “Vax-scene” performance as a cultural moment, which it was, just not in the way Colbert intended.

That vaccine dance segment might genuinely be one of the worst things ever broadcast on American television. It was so painfully unfunny, so desperately pandering, so completely disconnected from what actual human beings find entertaining that it became a perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with Colbert’s approach. He wasn’t trying to make people laugh. He was trying to make them comply, to lecture them, to shame them into agreeing with his politics. Comedy died and propaganda took its place.

The media establishment’s response to the cancellation has been predictably ridiculous. USA Today actually called Colbert a “gallant comic avenger,” which is the kind of overwrought nonsense you’d expect from people who’ve lost all perspective. Democrats have been fawning over him for “speaking truth to power,” which is genuinely hilarious considering he spent years as a cheerleader for the establishment, the mainstream media, and every conventional wisdom the coastal elites held dear. Speaking truth to power? The man was power’s favorite court jester.

Here’s what really happened. The market spoke. Viewers voted with their remotes and their attention, and they chose literally anything else. Free market capitalism worked exactly as it should. A product that nobody wanted, that cost too much to produce, and that served no real purpose got cancelled. CBS tried to make it work, probably longer than they should have because of the optics, but eventually even they had to acknowledge reality. Forty million dollars a year is real money, even for a major network.

The lesson here should be obvious but probably won’t be learned by the rest of late night television. People are tired of being lectured. They’re exhausted by the constant political haranguing. They want to laugh, not be told what to think. Comedy works best when it’s subversive, when it challenges assumptions, when it makes everyone a little uncomfortable. Colbert’s show did none of that. It was comfort food for people who already agreed with him, and even they eventually got full.

What comes next for CBS remains to be seen, but anything would be an improvement. The late night landscape has become so homogeneous, so predictable, so utterly boring that there’s a massive opportunity for someone willing to take actual risks. Someone who’ll make fun of everyone, who’ll find humor in the absurdity of modern life without turning every joke into a political cudgel. Someone who remembers that the job is to entertain, not to educate or indoctrinate.

Colbert had every advantage. A major network, a prime time slot, unlimited resources, and name recognition. He squandered all of it by choosing partisan hackery over genuine comedy. That’s his legacy now, and no amount of fawning media coverage can change it. The show’s over, the audience left long ago, and nobody’s asking for an encore.

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