CBS Just Revealed What's Replacing Stephen Colbert's "Late Show"
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert wraps up on May 21 after eleven years and CBS has finally answered the question everyone in late night has been asking — what comes next?
Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen is moving into the 11:35 p.m. slot starting May 22. Back-to-back half-hour episodes of the show will air Monday through Friday, followed immediately by back-to-back episodes of Allen's comedy game show Funny You Should Ask in the 12:37 a.m. slot. That's a full two-hour comedy block every single weeknight replacing what was previously one of the most recognizable brands in American television.
Comics Unleashed isn't exactly a stranger to CBS audiences — it's actually been airing on the network immediately after The Late Show for a while now. But moving from the warm-up act to the main event is a different thing entirely.
Allen, who created the show back in 2006, made clear from the jump what his programming philosophy looks like and it's about as far from Colbert's approach as you can get.
"I tell the comedians we're shooting I Love Lucy," he told the LA Times last year. "Something that's evergreen. I don't want to hear any political humor. Just be funny, family-friendly and advertiser-friendly."
That's a deliberate and significant departure from what Colbert built his version of The Late Show into — pointed political comedy that became appointment viewing for a specific and passionate audience, particularly during the first and second Trump administrations. Colbert's show leaned into the political moment harder than almost any other late night program and built a loyal following doing it.
Whether that audience follows a host-driven political comedy show into retirement, migrates somewhere else entirely, or gives something lighter and more apolitical a genuine shot is genuinely unknown. Late night has been a shifting landscape for years and nobody has fully cracked the code on what the audience actually wants right now.
Why The Late Show Is Ending
CBS canceled The Late Show in July 2025. Paramount, the network's parent company, described it as "purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night" — and went out of its way to stress that the show's content, performance, and other outside factors had nothing to do with it.
That backdrop is real. Late night television as a format has been under sustained financial pressure for years. Streaming, social media, cord-cutting, and shifting viewing habits have all taken bites out of an audience that used to reliably show up after the 11 o'clock news. Advertisers have followed eyeballs elsewhere. The economics that made The Tonight Show and Late Show institutions for decades simply don't exist in the same form anymore.
The Late Show itself has a history worth pausing on. David Letterman hosted it for over two decades — from 1993 until his retirement in 2015 — and turned it into one of the defining programs of American late night. His dry, ironic, often absurdist sensibility shaped an entire generation of comedy.
When Colbert took over in 2015 he inherited a massive institution and made it something genuinely his own, leaning into political satire at a moment when the political landscape gave him no shortage of material.
Eleven years later, on May 21, it ends.
What Colbert Is Actually Doing Next
He's not disappearing from public life — not even close. Colbert recently announced that his next major project after the show wraps is writing a new Lord of the Rings film with his son. If you know anything about Colbert's famously deep and lifelong obsession with Tolkien — he's fluent in Elvish, has corrected Peter Jackson on Tolkien lore in interviews, and has spoken about the books as genuinely formative to who he is — this is either the most surprising possible post-late-night move or the most inevitable one depending on your perspective.
His final episode guests haven't been announced yet. That announcement will almost certainly be a story in itself.
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