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Say what you will about Byron Allen’s low-cost, big-tent approach to late-night comedy—and people certainly do—but his new two-hour CBS block continues to turn up surprises in the ratings.
Two months after CBS closed up shop on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and handed his time period to Allen, the big picture at 11:35 pm remains largely unchanged. Comics Unleashed is still in third place, behind ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live! and NBC’s The Tonight Show.
But as we’ve previously reported, Allen’s first month of ratings showed an audience that behaves differently from the rest of late night: unusually live, largely undeterred by repeats, and strongest on Fridays.
A second month has surfaced another pattern—and it may be the most distinctive yet.
No matter the host or the network, late night’s most formidable rival has always been sleep. Allen is no exception. But measured by retention—the share of viewers who stay as the night wears on—Allen’s shows hold their audiences better than the CBS lineup they replaced, and far better than the competition they face deeper into the night.
Compare CBS’s 11:35 p.m. hour in June 2026 with the same hour one year earlier. Colbert’s Late Show and Allen’s Comics Unleashed decline at nearly the same rate over the first 15 minutes. Then the lines diverge:
Colbert's total audience kept falling through the hour, ending at 40 percent of the viewers who had been watching at 11:35. Allen holds 53 percent—and unlike Colbert, he's the norm, not the exception. Most late-night shows shed their audience gradually over the hour; The Late Show shed it fast. The demo shows a similar gap: Allen retains 60 percent of his 18–49 viewers, compared with 46 percent for Colbert.
Where Allen truly separates from the field is an hour later, when Funny You Should Ask airs opposite NBC's Late Night with Seth Meyers.
Meyers slides to 56 percent of his opening audience over the hour, while Funny You Should Ask holds 81 percent—the flattest line in late night.
That stickiness produces a surprising result by the end of the night. Last month, Allen's two-hour block opened at 11:35 p.m. with 37 percent of the audience Colbert drew in June 2025. Two hours later, at 1:35 a.m., the block was delivering CBS affiliates 89 percent of the audience After Midnight signed off with a year earlier.
Put another way: CBS’s new late-night block starts far behind the lineup it replaced and ends nearly even—not because Allen builds an audience, but because he holds on to the one he has, while last year’s shows were bleeding theirs away.
The ratings data can't tell us why the shows hold their audiences so differently. But the likeliest explanation comes down to something Allen's shows don't have: a monologue.
On conventional late-night programs, the show's opening segment is the main event—timely, topical, and usually the most widely circulated part of the show. It's also what makes those shows perishable. Allen's shows, by design, carry no such freight. Nothing in them is pegged to a particular day, which is why they play virtually the same in reruns—repeats of Comics Unleashed at 11:35 p.m. drew 95 percent of the first-run audience in June—and why the block can be stripped across the schedule indefinitely.
The absence of a monologue changes the shape of the night, too. On conventional shows, the biggest draw comes first, and when it ends and the program shifts into guest mode, large swaths of the audience leave with it. It's why Colbert, who opened bigger than anyone, fell off fastest.
Allen never draws that monologue crowd—but he never has to watch it leave, either.
None of this settles the core question of whether Allen can generate enough advertising revenue from the audience he does have to make his CBS time buy profitable. But two months in, that audience continues to behave unlike anything else in late night.
Ratings figures are Nielsen national Live+7 averages (including repeats and sustainers) for June 2026 and June 2025 unless otherwise noted.
