The Unspoken Truth: Stephen Colbert Reveals Why The Number One Show in Late Night Was Actually Forced Off The Air.NH
Stephen Colbert has opened up about his impending departure from The Late Show, what he’s considering as his next act and how he felt about his unceremonious sacking, despite being No. 1 in his time slot.
In a wide-ranging interview with GQ, Colbert, speaking by the pool at the Chateau Marmont, said that he was “surprised” by the decision to end his late-night show.
“Listen, every show’s got to end at some time. And I’ve been on a bunch of shows that have ended sometimes by our lights and sometimes by the decision of other people. That’s just the nature of show business. You can’t worry about that. You got to be a big boy about that. But I think we’re the first number one show to ever get canceled,” he said.
He admitted that the end of The Late Show, which will take place in May, “still seems like a long way away”.
CBS said the move was ““purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night” but Colbert again pointed out that it came two days after he called Paramount Global’s $16 million settlement of Donald Trump’s lawsuit a “big fat bribe”.
Colbert said he was told the network was getting out of late-night altogether because it’s no longer profitable, something, again, he called “surprising.”
“I can understand why people would have that reaction because CBS or the parent corporation — I’m not going to say who made that decision, because I don’t know; no one’s ever going to tell us — decided to cut a check for $16 million to the president of the United States over a lawsuit that their own lawyers, Paramount’s own lawyers, said is completely without merit. And it is self-evident that that is damaging to the reputation of the network, the corporation, and the news division. So it is unclear to me why anyone would do that other than to curry favor with a single individual,” he said. “If people have theories that associate me with that, it’s a reasonable thing to think, because CBS or the corporation clearly did it once. But my side of the street is clean and I have no interest in picking up a broom or adding to refuse on the other side of the street. Not my problem.”
He added that he has had a “great relationship” with CBS. “It’s one of the reasons why this was so surprising and so shocking that there was no preamble to this. We do budgets and everything like that. We’ve done cuts and stuff like that. So that’s why it was surprising to me, as I said, but I meant what I said [on air] the next night after I found out, because I couldn’t sit on it. They’ve been great partners. They really have. They’ve been very supportive. It took us six to nine months to find our legs. Even before people watched the show, we didn’t quite figure out what we wanted to do. It didn’t come fully assembled out of the box the way The Colbert Report did. And they stood by us and they were very supportive and they gave us what we needed and we found it and we delivered for them what we wanted. I want to do a good job,” he added.
He admitted that there was a “sense of relief” that he “might not have to put on the snorkel and get into the sewer every day.”
He said that he doesn’t know how they’re “going to land this plane” but he wants to do it “gracefully.”
Many have speculated that Colbert could create his own show on YouTube and bring over a significant portion of the 10 million that subscribe to The Late Show feed.
The former host of The Colbert Report said he wants to continue to make things in the future.
“I love creating things and I still want to work with the people I work with. I don’t know how you work with 200 people, 210, something like that, right? It’s an enormous amount of people. I love them. And I want to continue to do that with them to the degree that I can. And I want to find that with other people too. I just love making things,” he said.
