As “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” ends its run next month, CBS has opted to turn its 11:35 p.m. ET post-local news timeslot into a time buy, selling the slot to Byron Allen — who will move back-to-back episodes of his “Comics Unleashed” series down an hour.
The time buy deal is through the 2026-2027 TV season; as part of the deal, Allen will also continue to lease the 12:37 a.m. hour with another strip from his company, the comedy game show “Funny You Should Ask.”
“The Late Show” airs its finale on May 21 — wrapping a franchise that first started in 1993 when David Letterman moved to the Eye network from his NBC perch (having been passed over for “The Tonight Show”). Colbert has been hosting “The Late Show” since Letterman retired in 2015. Allen will take over the time slot the following night, on May 22.
Meanwhile, Allen has paid CBS to run two episodes of “Comics Unleashed” — usually a new episode paired with a library half-hour — at 12:37 a.m. ET in recent years. First, he took the slot during a 2023-to-2024 gap after “The Late Late Show With James Corden” ended and before “After Midnight” launched in January 2024. He once again took the slot in September 2025 as “After Midnight” ended its run.
“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,” said Allen, the founder/chairman/CEO of Allen Media Group, said in a statement. “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 and Allen haven’t revealed how much Allen and his Allen Media Group pays for the 12:37 a.m. slot, and it’s unclear how much more he might pay the network to take over 11:35 p.m. as well. In traditional time buys, a company will lease a time period from a network, and then sell the advertising itself. So in effect, CBS will be making money for the hour — even though its ratings will likely go down as it loses what has been the No. 1 talk show in late night in “The Late Show.”
According to insiders, even though it’s a time buy from Allen, both “Comics Unleashed” and “Funny You Should Ask” are considered national network programming — and the Eye expects its affiliates to continue to clear CBS late night and air both shows.
“Comics Unleashed” originally shot around 233 episodes between 2006 and 2016 as a syndicated series before resuming production on new episodes for the 2025-2026 TV season on CBS. The show is executive produced by Allen, Carolyn Folks, Jennifer Lucas, Jodi Miller, Peter Steen and Dylan King.
As for “Funny You Should Ask,” the series premiered in syndication as a first-run strip in September 2017. Jon Kelley hosts the gamer, which is exec produced by Allen, Carolyn Folks, Jennifer Lucas, Bob Boden, Jodi Miller, Peter Steen, Scott Satin and Eric Charbonnel.
Allen has been lobbying to take over the 11:35 p.m. slot from almost the moment that it was revealed that “The Late Show” was ending. “If they’re looking for a show, my hand is already up,” Allen said during New York’s Advertising Week event last October. “50 years, I’ve been waiting for this moment. Definitely, I’m going for it… I’m investing millions and millions of dollars to prove myself at 12:35.”
With CBS going from paying for an expensive late night show to being paid for the time slot, network insiders note that this now makes the Eye profitable in late night — and that this is a first step toward reimagining how to do original, economical fare in the time period.
Since CBS decided to get out of the late night talk business, other options included returning to drama reruns (“Crimetime After Primetime”), which is what CBS ran before “Late Show With David Letterman” premiered in 1993. Another option was to expand local news to an hour at 11 p.m., giving affiliates an extra half hour.
CBS announced last July that “The Late Show” would be canceled at the end of May 2026, and contended that it was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
But that excuse was roundly derided, given that CBS owner Paramount Global was in the process of being acquired by Skydance, and needed government approval from an administration that has frequently demanded quid pro quos. And silencing a critic of Donald Trump was seen as a way to curry favor from the administration. Just days earlier, Colbert had criticized Paramount Global’s $16 million settlement with Trump, calling it a “big fat bribe.”
And indeed, almost immediately, Trump wrote on social media that “I absolutely love’ that Colbert was fired.
In a column for Variety, Sen. Elizabeth Warren wrote that it had an appearance of “bribery in plain sight”: “Was it a coincidence that CBS canceled Colbert just three days after he spoke out? Are we sure that this wasn’t part of a wink-wink deal between the president and a giant corporation that needed something from his administration? If CBS made this decision for “purely financial” reasons, why the timing? And why did Trump say “I hope I played a major part in” getting Colbert fired? These are fair questions, and ones that I have asked Paramount and Skydance.”
The Writers Guild of America also called for Paramount to be investigated for bribery by the New York state attorney general following the news. In one bright result, Colbert won the variety talk Emmy in 2025 following the news (late night competitor Jimmy Kimmel even erected a billboard throwing his support toward Colbert).
In an interview with GQ, Colbert tip-toed around the conventional wisdom that CBS had fired him to please Trump, but he did say, “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.”
Regardless of the reason, Letterman blasted CBS for how it handled Colbert’s firing: “This is pure cowardice,” he said on his YouTube channel. “They did not do the correct thing. They did not handle Stephen Colbert — the face of that network — in the way he deserves to have been handled.” He also posted a flurry of clips from his time on “Late Show” mocking CBS, with the caption to the supercut reading, “You can’t spell CBS without BS.”
CBS was once again criticized in February when “The Late Show” was blocked by the network from broadcasting an interview with Texas State Rep. James Talarico — fearing retribution from the FCC. So, instead the conversation was posted on YouTube and other social media platforms, where at last count, the clip had been viewed more than 9.3 million times.
