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A rupture in the late-night television landscape is set to occur next month as CBS has found a new tenant for the slot being vacated by the network’s cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
CBS announced Monday that Byron Allen’s syndicated comic talk show “Comics Unleashed” will take over the time slot that currently belongs to liberal darling Stephen Colbert beginning May 22, filling the hour-long programming gap with two back-to-back 30-minute episodes. In addition, the network will air Allen’s comic-fueled game show “Funny You Should Ask” the following hour with two back-to-back episodes.
“I created and launched ‘Comics Unleashed’ 20 years ago so my fellow comedians could have a platform to do what we all love – make people laugh,” Allen said in a press release. “I truly appreciate CBS’ confidence in me by picking up our two-hour comedy block of ‘Comics Unleashed’ and ‘Funny You Should Ask,’ because the world can never have enough laughter.”
CBS TO REPLACE COLBERT’S ‘LATE SHOW’ WITH BYRON ALLEN’S ‘COMICS UNLEASHED’
CBS announced that Byron Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” will take over the time slot once belonging to “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” (Paras Griffin/Getty Images)
The programming move by CBS is a unique one — and perhaps lucrative — since Allen Media Group is the one footing the bill for airtime, not CBS.
“This is them essentially renting the time slot to these two shows,” veteran entertainment industry journalist Matt Belloni said on Monday’s installment of “The Town” podcast.
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The Tiffany Network was engulfed in controversy after it announced last July that it was canceling Colbert’s show, a decision critics claimed was political while the network insisted was purely a financial one.
Belloni, who previously reported “The Late Show” was losing CBS $40 million a year and had been running on a whopping $100 million budget per season, called Monday’s announcement a “pretty sad moment for late night.”
CBS shocked the media landscape when it announced the cancellation of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” last year. (Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images)
“And my prediction is this is only the beginning,” Belloni said. “I think once Kimmel, Fallon, Meyers are done, this is coming for the rest of late night. They are essentially going to be turned into infomercial slots where they will rent out the time to these other shows that are produced elsewhere and that they’ll do a [revenue] share they’ll do an ad split or something like that where it just becomes financially more advantageous to give up and rent up the slot.”
Derek Reisfield, a former media executive who served as CBS’s vice president of business development, called the Byron Allen arrangement a “revenue generator” that historically had been done by cable networks and affiliate stations on the weekends, telling Digital it’s a “decent economic move” by CBS.
“I think part of the context of this is, if you’re running Paramount and CBS, there’s so much that’s going on that this just takes a distraction off the table for a year,” Reisfield said. “So it’s like, ‘Okay, we can do this, we’ll get paid. If we want to do something with this time slot, we could do it down the road. But in the meantime, we’ve booked revenue for the year.'”
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While he refrained from declaring this the death of late night, Reisfield insisted the other networks will look at what CBS is doing amid the broader trends of financial losses in linear television and reevaluate whether maintaining their late-night programming is worth it.
“The stars take a lot of that revenue and as it shrinks, you know, people have to rethink what they’re doing,” Reisfield said.
According to Belloni’s reporting, Colbert was making $15-20 million per year.
Industry experts speculate whether the CBS-Byron Allen deal will be the footprint for how networks handle late-night programming like ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” (Randy Holmes/ABC via Getty Images)
Colbert’s late-night colleagues appear to be safe, at least in the near future. ABC extended Jimmy Kimmel’s deal through at least May 2027 after he nearly faced his own cancellation over comments he made about Charlie Kirk’s accused assassin last year. After Colbert’s cancellation, “Saturday Night Live” creator and executive producer Lorne Michaels, who is also the executive producer of “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” suggested NBC stars Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers are safe based on conversations he had with Comcast CEO Brian Roberts. Fallon and Meyers’ contracts expire in 2028.
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