With the end of the late show, the era of traditional television is on its deathbed

The TV era late at night is currently breathless for air, lying in a hospital bed and waiting to die. It may seem dark, but it is no less true. We recently learned that CBS cancels “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” in May 2026. In addition, Colbert is not simply replaced. On the contrary, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, simply ends the “Late Show” franchise, one of the pillars of the end of evening television for more than three decades. With this, not only the end of the night on Life Support, but television as we also knew on his deathbed.

When Colbert took over “The Late Show” by David Letterman in 2015, it was a very different period. Traditional television still had a lot of relevance, Colbert having become a star on “The Colbert Report” from Comedy Central before obtaining the very coveted concert. Meanwhile, Netflix was, more or less, the only significant streaming service in town. It was then, it’s now.

In 2025, Netflix generated more income than the entire combined global box office. Aside from Netflix, we have Disney +, Hulu, HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount +, Amazon Prime Video and a multitude of other smaller streaming services for attention. Elsewhere, the major media companies sell television networks as if it is getting rid of – namely because it East Get out because these old table culture table centers lose relevant / audience each year. To this end, CBS leaders, in a statement, described this as a purely financial decision, affirming the following:

“We consider Stephen Colbert irreplaceable and retire the franchise” The Late Show “in May in 2026. We are proud that Stephen called CBS at home. He and the broadcast will remember the financial decision in the pantheon at the end of the night.

Dating gold days of “The Tonight Show” when Johnny Carson organized, these programs were pillars of the greatest American cultural conversation. Even when Jay Leno took over, he was followed by “Late Night with Conan O’Brien”. At the time, NBC could easily maintain one but two major talk shows with millions of viewers, all while Letterman went strong on CBS.

The fact that CBS cancels “late evening” rather than changing the creative directions is revealing. Similarly, the network had previously canceled “The Late Late Show” after the departure of James Corden in 2023 (rather than finding a new host) and also recently hatched the late evening comedy program “After Midnight”, so Colbert is not an isolated case. Indeed, these former pillars of pop culture have trouble finding relevance in the modern media landscape and more and more exploded for years.

To this end, NBC took “The Tonight Show”, now organized by Jimmy Fallon, from five nights a week to four last year to save costs and may save the show a little longer. How long will Fallon last? And “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” On ABC? It should be noted that Colbert had an average of around 2.4 million viewers, while Kimmel obtained approximately 1.7 million and Fallon Trails with only 1.1 million, by latenger.com. It is to say nothing about “The Daily Show” or “Late Night with Seth Meyers”.

All these programs draw fractions of the public they once had and, as such, are beginning to have less and less financial meaning for the major companies that support them. With Colbert, however, timing is certainly questionable. Paramount only settled barely a trial that President Trump filed during an interview of 2024 “60 minutes” with the candidate of the time, Kamala Harris. Trump said that the interview had been published in order to mislead the voters in error, and although Paramount labeled the “without merit” costume (and published all the images publicly to support his complaint), she still paid.

Trump, of course, is a vocal critic of Colbert and Kimmel (and vice versa). Meanwhile, Paramount is currently awaiting regulatory approval from its merger with Skydance, which was announced for the first time last year. That being the case, it is difficult not to wonder if the “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” being canceled was somehow motivated politically.

I am not here to descend this rabbit burrow in particular at this particular moment. Anyway, the message is clear: “The Late Show” is consumable. After all, would the company have canceled the programs of the universe “Yellowstone” by Taylor Sheridan if Trump did not love them?

The fact that Colbert currently has the best grades in television at the end of the American evening and is the first to leave resembles writing on the wall. What is the probability that Kimmel or Meyers wins these viewers once Colbert leaves? Could NBC and ABC look at what CBS does and consider a similar decision? All this seems possible at the moment. In addition, the end of what television was once in favor of what it becomes, for better or for worse, seems entirely inevitable in the light of “The Late Show” by disappearing.

The broadcasting and cable television audience fell below 50% of the total audience number in 2023. It has continued to decrease only since then. Similarly, Directv bleeds after losing the rights of NFL Sunday tickets, with more and more sports rights directed towards streaming rather than traditional television. Meanwhile, Netflix continues to dominate with its original programming, and even programs made for networks tend to find their audience in streaming. The collapse of television late at night gives the impression of shooting this crucial block of JENGA towards the end of the game, which started to tremble the tower. It’s not over yet, but it will soon be.

The fact is that the relevance and audience of the end of the night were in decline. Circumstances may feel suspicious; Heck the whole situation may seem in place. Anyway, the unhappy truth is that the end of the night has been on support for life for some time. The writing was on the wall, and it is now inevitable. With the collapse of the end of the imminent night, one of the last bastions of traditional television is going out. Aside from the cable news, very soon, there will be almost nothing to help keep it alive.

Television will always exist, of course, but it is intended to become a lifeless shadow of what it was in the past. The point of no return is on us.