‘CBS Is Just Cooked’: Andy Cohen Lays Out Why Colbert Cancelation Makes No Sense

Bravo’s Andy Cohen is confounded by CBS’s decision to end The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

The network announced last Thursday that it would be canceling Stephen Colbert’s late night show after its current season finishes airing in May 2026 — citing it as a “purely a financial decision.” The announcement, which was met in many quarters with shock and outrage, came on the heels of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, settling a lawsuit filed against them by President Donald Trump. The president sued CBS over a 60 Minutes interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, which he claimed had been deceptively edited.

The corporation settled Trump’s lawsuit for $16 million in early July — a move which many believe was made to curry favor with the administration so the FCC will approve Skydance Media’s merger with Paramount.

On Monday’s episode of his show on SiriusXM’s Radio Andy, Cohen described to co-host John Hill why “CBS is just cooked.”

Cohen began by examining the network’s claim that the show was canceled because it was losing money.

“I think it is possible that it’s losing money and typically what would happen if a show is losing money that is also super important to the network– which that show, and the late night time slot has been important to CBS for the last 25 years since Letterman began it on CBS at the Ed Sullivan Theater in like the mid-nineties– what they would probably do is say, ‘Listen, Stephen, your show is losing X amount of money a year. There’s two things we could do,'” explained Cohen. “‘We could cut the budget in half, maybe move out of the Ed Sullivan Theater, do the show in a small studio that we already own,’ because CBS has a lot of studio space. Cut down on staff. You have 200 people working here. We needed to be 100 people or 60 and instead of you doing your show five days a week, we’re gonna do your show four days a week and you’re gonna gonna pre-tape your Thursday show, so you’re actually gonna be in production three days a week. That’s a way right there to cut the budget at least in half.

“You don’t jump straight to canceling,” Hill said — concurring.

COHEN: As opposed to saying out of nowhere as he portrayed it, they called him in and said, “Your show’s losing money. We’re canceling it in a year.”

HILL: Right, and also the timing kind of weird? This isn’t when those things are announced usually. Don’t they usually happen at a different time? It seems very much like it is, there’s no mistaking that this is what it’s about.

COHEN: It’s like, or they would say, “Stephen, by the end of the year, we need to make these cuts and we’ll give you another year, but we want to give you another year or two with all these cuts and then we’re gonna see we’re gonna cut our losses and if you wind up, you know, losing X amount, whatever.”

“Instead they’re turning the lights out completely at 11:30,” concluded Cohen. “Which says to me, it’s like CBS is just cooked. I mean, you got, it’s just, it is cooked. They are saying, ‘We are done.'”