Time has not abated David Letterman‘s distaste for CBS’s decision to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and in doing so end 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 has doubled down on calling out CBS—including the network’s justification for jettisoning The Late Show.
To this day, CBS maintains that Colbert’s cancellation was strictly a financial decision, citing declining ad revenues across the late-night landscape. Letterman, however, begs to differ.
After all, not two days before the axe was dropped on The Late Show, Colbert had said on-air that the $16 million settlement between CBS parent Paramount and President Donald Trump, who had sued over what he claimed was a deceptively edited 60 Minutes interview with then-candidate Kamala Harris, was, in “legal” terms, a “big fat bribe.”
“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 businessman as well as 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. “TV may be not the money machine it once was.”
Indeed, CBS upon cancelling The Late Show made no commitment to original programming that’d eventually replace it. Instead, the network wound up essentially “selling” Colbert’s 11:35 p.m. hour to TV titan Byron Allen, whose Comics Unleashed panel show will move up an hour to fill the void, all while Allen directly sells ad time.
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.”
