Seven Ratings Takeaways From Byron Allen’s First Month at 11:35

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A full month of Live+7 ratings data is now in for Byron Allen‘s two-hour CBS late-night block, which launched May 22 with two half hours of Comics Unleashed taking over the 11:35 p.m. slot Stephen Colbert used to own—and two episodes of Funny You Should Ask sliding into Comics Unleashed‘s old post-midnight home.

That’s long enough for a picture of Allen’s CBS audience to emerge. The short version: a stable, repeat-proof viewership that skews old, watches live and isn’t growing—for better and worse, exactly what the block was designed to deliver.

The longer version is below.

1. He’s a distant third—but the floor is holding

Because Kimmel and Fallon are measured as hour-long programs, the fair comparison is Allen’s full 11:35–12:35 hour: a mostly first-run half hour of Comics Unleashed followed by a rerun.

Across its first four weeks, that hour averaged just under 700,000 viewers in Live+7—about a quarter of Jimmy Kimmel Live‘s 2.7 million and half of The Tonight Show‘s 1.4 million.

If you’re wondering whether he’s climbing: no. The trajectory of Allen’s 11:35 p.m. hour is the flattest line in late night—a premiere night just under a million viewers fueled by curiosity, a dip over the following two weeks, and a floor that has held firmly in the high 600,000s ever since.

It isn’t growing, and it isn’t collapsing. For an operation whose entire premise is predictability, a firm floor after four weeks is a sellable asset. Ad buyers don’t like surprises, and this show appears incapable of producing one.

2. Fridays are quietly his best story

Every other program in late night sheds audience on Fridays: Kimmel drops 29 percent versus his Monday-through-Thursday average, Late Night With Seth Meyers falls 22 percent, and The Tonight Show slips 7 percent.

Allen’s hour goes up 11 percent, with the flagship half hour gaining 14 percent to post its best night of the week. He’s leaning into it, too: on four of the block’s five Fridays, Comics Unleashed was the only first-run show at 11:35, on a night his competitors have overwhelmingly ceded to reruns.

Some of that is surely structural—Friday is CBS’s strongest night in primetime, with an older-skewing lineup that hands the local news, and then Allen, an audience that looks a lot like his. But whatever the mechanism, the pattern is the same: on the night the rest of late night goes dark, Allen’s block over-indexes.

The competitive effect is striking either way: on Fridays, Allen’s hour climbs from a quarter of Kimmel’s audience to nearly 40 percent, and from half of Fallon’s to 60 percent.

3. The evergreen bet is paying off

The heart of Allen's pitch is that his shows are evergreen—that viewers neither know nor care whether an episode is new. A month in, the data backs him up.

When the flagship half hour aired a full week of repeats in early June, it retained 90 percent of its first-run audience in the same slot. Kimmel's reruns keep 57 percent of his.

The starkest version of the argument sits an hour later. Funny You Should Ask, airing nothing but repeats at 12:35, is delivering 87 percent of the total audience that After Midnight—an original, staffed, nightly production—drew in the same window last year, and matching it exactly among adults 18-49.

Under Allen's arrangement with CBS, where his company covers all production costs and recoups through its own ad sales, content that performs identically whether it cost something or nothing to produce that night isn't a curiosity. It's the whole business model, working.

4. The audience skews old—and Allen is the one who has to sell it

Now the other side of the ledger. Allen's block is the oldest-skewing comedy programming in late night: adults under 50 make up just 11 to 12 percent of its audience, versus 14 to 15 percent for Kimmel and Fallon and 20 percent for The Daily Show—a profile closer to a news program than to the comedy it competes with. (Only Gutfeld!, at 6 percent, skews older.)

The consequence shows up in the demo rankings, where it isn't just Kimmel and Fallon who's beating him—it's everyone.

Allen's hour averages 78,000 viewers aged 18-49. Nightline, a news program that starts after 12:35 a.m., delivers more than double that. Seth Meyers delivers 50 percent more from the same post-midnight slot, and The Daily Show roughly three times as much from basic cable.

That matters more here than it would for a normal network show: because Allen leases the hour and sells the national advertising himself, the thinnest demo profile in late night comedy is his problem to price, not CBS's.

5. Nobody records this show—and that's revealing

The single most distinctive number in the dataset: 96 percent of the block's total weekly audience watches live or same-day, making it the least time-shifted programming in late night.

Kimmel adds 17 percent to his audience over a week of delayed viewing. The Daily Show more than doubles.

Allen's audience, in other words, is a lean-back audience—people who are already on the couch at 11:35 and stay there, rather than viewers queuing the show up on their own schedule. It's old-fashioned appointment-free television, and there's a real upside to it: a live audience is an audience that actually sits through the commercials.

Between the stability, the live viewing and the Friday counter-programming, there's a coherent—if unglamorous—sales story here. It's just being told about a small, old audience.

6. The Colbert-shaped hole

In the same four weeks last year, The Late Show averaged 1.8 million viewers in Live+7—even with nearly half its telecasts in reruns.

Hour for hour, the Allen block is retaining about 38 percent of that audience, and just over half of it among adults 18-49.

No one expected Allen's show to hold Colbert's numbers—CBS has said the Late Show was losing roughly $40 million a year, and the point of the Allen deal was to stop the bleeding, not the audience erosion.

But the more than 60 percent of Colbert's audience that didn't stay went somewhere, and the same-period surges at NBC and ABC suggest a fair share of it walked across the street.

7. The NBA Finals put a thumb on the scale

An asterisk on those surges: the NBA Finals on ABC inflated June's competitive gaps.

Kimmel's biggest nights of the month—including a 3.5 million-viewer episode—came directly out of Finals telecasts, and both Kimmel and Fallon benefited from basketball lead-ins. The distance between first and third is real, but it's somewhat wider on paper right now than it may be in a normal month.

What to watch from here

Does the floor hold through the dead of summer, when the block's stability could become its biggest asset? Do Fridays keep over-indexing—and does the edge grow in the fall, when CBS's Friday primetime originals return and hand him an even bigger lead-in?

Can Allen's ad sales operation turn a small, old, stable, live audience into more than the reported $15 million a year he's paying CBS, plus production costs? And with the time buy running only through the 2026-27 season—and CBS making clear it hasn't closed the door on other options for the time period—does the arrangement outlast its expiration date?

For now, Byron Allen is running the only late night show in America that was built to be exactly this: small, steady, cheap and always on. One month in, that is precisely what the data shows.

Ratings figures are Nielsen national live-plus-seven-day averages for May 22–June 19, 2026, and May 23–June 20, 2025, except where noted. Comparisons to hour-long programs use the average of both "Comics Unleashed" half hours.

Ratings data © The Nielsen Company, used under license.