If Hollywood was trying to send CBS a message at this year’s Emmy Awards, it did a pretty good job.
The network, which came into this year’s ceremonies with 32 Emmy nominations, exited with six wins—all for just one show: The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
Put another way, were it not for Colbert, CBS—the Tiffany Network—would have gone 0-for-32 at the Emmys.
That would have been a remarkable first for the network, going all the way back to 1950. It’s a far cry from 1974, when CBS collected 44 Emmys, still the record for a network or platform in a single year. (Netflix tied it in 2021.)
But the more telling comparison may not be between CBS now and CBS fifty years ago.
For decades, premium cable networks and, more recently, streaming services have chased prestige television—the kind of programming that attracts big-name talent, racks up critical acclaim, and wins Emmys. HBO built its brand around it. Netflix, Apple TV, and others followed the same playbook.
CBS has generally played a different game. Its bread and butter remains broad-appeal television: procedurals, reality franchises, game shows, and sports. It doesn’t need The White Lotus when it has NCIS.
But it did have one show that gave it a regular seat at the prestige-TV table.
The problem was that it came at a price CBS no longer wanted to pay.
In announcing the end of Colbert’s Late Show, the network called the decision purely financial, stressing that it had nothing to do with the show’s performance or content. Colbert ultimately signed off on May 21 after eleven seasons.
Four months later, the Television Academy honored practically every part of the operation CBS had decided it could no longer afford.
The Late Show won for writing. It won for directing. It won for picture editing, lighting design, and technical direction and camerawork. And on the final night of the Emmys, it won Outstanding Variety Series for the second year in a row.
There was even a seventh Emmy from the Colbert orbit: Colbert Before Air, the show’s digital offshoot, which won Outstanding Short Form Comedy, Drama or Variety Series.
Zoom out to Paramount as a whole, and the picture gets even more striking.
Across its portfolio of broadcast, cable, and streaming brands, Paramount came into the Emmys with 65 nominations. It left with 11 wins—nine of them for late-night shows.
Seven came from The Late Show and Colbert Before Air, and two came from The Daily Show.
That left RuPaul’s Drag Race and South Park as the only non-late-night programs in the entire Paramount portfolio to win an Emmy.
There’s an irony in late night becoming a source of prestige in the first place. These aren’t eight-episode limited series painstakingly assembled over two years. They’re topical shows built to turn around hours of television every week, knowing most of what they produce will be old news within days.
The value of a late-night show has traditionally been measured in ratings, advertising revenue, and, increasingly, digital views. Those are relatively easy numbers to put into a spreadsheet. Harder to quantify is the value of having hundreds of writers, producers, performers, editors, directors, musicians, and craftspeople making something with your network’s name on it night after night—and occasionally making something the rest of the industry considers the best television of the year.
CBS may have decided it could live without The Late Show. This year’s Emmys offered a pretty good indication of what the network looks like without it.
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