Former late-night talk show host Samantha Bee has said that the “awful” decision to cancel Stephen Colbert’s Late Show was a “no-brainer” given that the series was “haemorrhaging money”.
Bee, who rose to fame as a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart before launching her own show Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, made the comments during a recent appearance on the Breaking Bread with Tom Papa podcast.
Discussing the show’s cancellation, actor and comedian Tom Papa noted that Colbert’s show had been losing $40m a year, and that its “parent company is trying to curry favour with the president” in light of the Paramount and Skydance merger.
The Late Show is broadcast by CBS. Owned by Paramount, it relies on the Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission to approve its $8bn sale to Skydance.
In response, Bee said that she thought the decision to end the show was “awful”, but did concede that it was losing money: “These legacy shows are haemorrhaging money with no real end to that – in sight, people are just not tuning in.”
Bee said that she was “shocked, not surprised” to hear of Colbert’s cancellation, adding that she considers him to be a friend.
The 55-year-old added: “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 also touched on the vital role that Trump plays in 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,” she said. The US president often found himself the target of Colbert’s jokes on-air.
“He’s a thin-skinned idiot and we know he’s like a pernicious cancer and he cares about that stuff,” said Bee of Trump.
She recalled how when she was the host of Full Frontal, corporate mergers were a “constant source of conversation” as broadcasters were wary of not causing any trouble amid the multi-billion-dollar transactions.
“It’s so much easier for them to cut it loose with this merger coming down the pike,” she said of Colbert’s series. “It makes the decision such a no-brainer, and probably the most agonising 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.”
Colbert, 61, has long been a vocal critic of Trump, but has been particularly outspoken in recent weeks following rumours that the cancellation of his CBS series was a move by Paramount to please Trump.
Colbert and Trump’s recent feud began when Colbert said that Paramount’s decision to pay a $16m settlement to Trump over another CBS show, 60 Minutes, amounted to a “big fat bribe”.
Very soon after Colbert’s “bribe” comment, Paramount announced the cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which will come off the air in May next year.
Trump revelled in the firing of one of his loudest detractors, posting on his Truth Social platform: “I absolutely love that Colbert was fired.” The TV personality responded by declaring that the “gloves are off”.
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