Time has not tempered David Letterman‘s distaste for CBS’s decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, ending the 33-year-old late-night franchise he founded in 1993.
Last July, in the immediate wake of Late Show being unceremoniously handed an end date, Letterman called his former employers “gutless” and “cowards” for how they handled Stephen Colbert’s ouster.
Now, nine months later in a new Q&A with the New York Times, Letterman is doubling down—calling out CBS on its justification for jettisoning The Late Show.
Though CBS maintains that Colbert’s cancellation was strictly a financial decision, citing declining ad revenues across the late-night landscape, Letterman begs to differ.
“He was dumped,” Letterman opined to the Times, “because the people selling the network to Skydance said, ‘Oh no, there’s not going to be any trouble with that guy. We’re going to take care of the show. We’re just going to throw that into the deal. When will the ink on the check dry?’”
In other words, “I’m just going to go on record as saying: They’re lying,” Letterman asserted. “Let me just add one other thing….They’re lying weasels.”
A veteran of the late-night game, Letterman is not oblivious to the challenges facing the industry. “All of television seems to have been nicked by digital communication and streaming platforms and on and on,” he said, noting that traditional broadcast TV is “not the money machine it once was.”
Indeed, upon cancelling The Late Show, CBS said it was abandoning original late-night programming. Though the network has since indicated that it’s actively considering lower-cost original programming, concepts, for now it has essentially “sold” Colbert’s 11:35 p.m. hour to Byron Allen, whose Comics Unleashed panel show will move up an hour to fill the void, with Allen selling the ad time to sponsors himself.
Letterman likened that leasing of time slots to the self-storage facilities that “didn’t used to exist” but now pepper the landscape.
“You used to have to be responsible for your own stuff. But now everywhere you look there’s warehouses and rental facilities. And I think that’s not a bad parallel for what’s happening in network television,” he told the Times. “We’re just going to lease it to Byron Allen and he’ll make pennies on every dollar or whatever he’s making.”
