Byron Allen Has His Hand Raised for Stephen Colbert’s CBS Time Slot

Could the successor to David Letterman and Stephen Colbert at 11:35 p.m. on CBS be Byron Allen and his roundtable of stand-up comics?

If Allen gets his way, that’s exactly what’s going to happen after Colbert’s edition of The Late Show ends its run—thanks to cancellation by CBS—in May. He stands ready to jump into that time period with his now 20-year-old comedy/talk show, Comics Unleashed.

That’s what Allen—the longtime comic, TV host, independent producer, and indefatigable explorer of opportunities left in the wake of the disintegrating broadcast business—told me during a session at the annual Advertising Week conference in Manhattan on Wednesday.

Specifically, to my question of whether he would raise his hand again to fill the Colbert opening at CBS, as he did after the network shut down its 12:35 a.m. entry, After Midnight, last June, Allen said: “It’s already raised.”

This is totally consistent with how the founder and CEO of Allen Media Group has reacted to a panoply of media and sports opportunities over the past two or three decades, chasing ownership of everything from a horde of TV stations to cable properties including The Weather Channel—to the Denver Broncos.

Not to mention Paramount Global.

An 11:35 p.m. network late-night franchise is a smaller target, but clearly a prized one for Allen, who initially made his name in show business as the youngest stand-up (he was 18) ever to perform a set on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

“Nothing better,” he said of the shot at late night. “Fifty years I’ve been waiting for this moment. Definitely I’m going for it.”

To be clear, CBS’s entertainment division has said it plans to abandon the 11:35 p.m. time period, as it did with the 12:35 a.m. slot when After Midnight passed into history. But just as CBS sold the 12:35 a.m. slot outright to Allen Media Group—which finances the purchase by direct sales to advertisers—Allen would like to do the same an hour earlier.

It’s a formula Allen has used extensively to get various shows on the air over the years, including many of the current court shows, a comedy game show called Funny You Should Ask, and Comics Unleashed, which he created in 2006.

The show has played across various distribution platforms—including an earlier trial run (Allen’s term) in the interim between the end of James Corden’s Late Late Show and the start of After Midnight two years ago—re-running episodes taped in the Aughts and Teens of this century.

Allen doesn’t just own and sell Comics Unleashed; he hosts it as well. He acknowledged Wednesday that his voice was a little scratchy because he had taped six new episodes of Comics Unleashed in L.A. one day earlier.

That means he was at it for six hours, because the half-hour episodes are shot over an hour of taping and then edited down. At the moment, a new half-hour episode of Comics Unleashed airs at 12:35 a.m. on CBS’s network of stations, followed by a repeat of one of the show’s earlier episodes.

That tightly condensed shooting schedule helps explain Allen’s method for holding down costs as he seeks enough ad revenue to make these deals work. As he laid it out, he uses the same studio and crew for the six shows, books comics to come in for just that one day, and ensures that all the comedy material is “evergreen.”

That means, he said, “no topical humor, no politics, no sexist jokes, no homophobic jokes,” or anything else that would be deemed either potentially offensive—or, especially, perishable in terms of relevance.

Following that formula has allowed the show to continue running repeats many years old, because the jokes have to work in any era. Allen said he wants the show to be I Love Lucy—meaning it can run somewhere in the video universe basically in perpetuity.

Of course, he is aware of the turmoil now running through traditional, taped-fresh-every-day late-night shows, driven both by mounting costs and shrinking revenue—and a president who takes umbrage (and sometimes legal action) against people he doesn’t like, including each and every one of the current network late-night hosts.

That translates to disruption, and Allen called himself “a dedicated disruptor.”

He said advertisers can take comfort in the safe haven of his noncontroversial show, whose material will never comment about a current president because that would undermine its “evergreen” status.

“We are in business with over 600 advertisers,” Allen said, many of which have done deals with him for decades. “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Because I’m in business with every TV station in America. We are the largest provider of first-run television shows. We provide more first-run television shows than all the studios combined.”

That seems like a mind-boggling stat. Without a thorough fact-check, what can confidently be said is that Allen Media does provide an enormous number of episodes of television—most with modest national profiles.

That’s by design. Allen doesn’t look for flashy shows. He looks for flexible shows—ones he can run on a range of platforms and then re-run on others.

But the late-night entry at 11:35 p.m. on CBS stations nationally, in a spot formerly occupied by Letterman and Colbert? That’s pretty high-profile stuff.

“They’ve pulled out of the time period, totally,” Allen said, referring to CBS. “But if they’re looking for a show, my hand is already in.”

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