CBS says the late Byron Allen deal will generate $15 million in profits

How can you make a lot of, well, some money late at night? According to CBS, the trick is to cancel your traditional show and rent the time to someone else.

Broadcaster Paramount Skydance, which has been under fire for weeks for its decision to oust Stephen Colbert and cancel the long-running “Late Show,” says the move will turn its small-hours business around to a profit from a loss.

“We are proud to work with Byron Allen on a new business and programming model for late night that proactively addresses a network daypart that has been prohibitively expensive to continue,” the company said in a statement Thursday. “With this ‘time buy’ model, we took an hour of annual losses of approximately $40 million and turned them into $15 million in profits – a turnaround of $55 million.”

CBS has been ridiculed and criticized for weeks when Colbert cut his program and invited guests who smeared network executives. David Letterman, who hosted the “Late Show” before Colbert, compared the executives behind the cancellation decision to “lying weasels” during an appearance in the waning days of the program.

Much of the industry believes that Colbert was canceled not for the financial reasons CBS touts, but because of the desire of Paramount executives to flatter President Donald Trump, who is known to hate late-night comics that make fun of him and his policies. Colbert relied heavily on political humor — a move that helped “Late Show” draw more total viewers than rivals like NBC’s “Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon’a and ABC’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” Colbert’s facility with hot, headline-grabbing topics helped turn around CBS’ late-night fortunes.

Adding fuel to the fire were the lackluster ratings for the debut of Allen’s “Comics Unleashed” roundtable the day after Colbert’s finale. According to Nielsen data, the series generated a total of 878,000 viewers across two half-hour shows on Friday, May 22. The first half hour was a first episode and the second was a repeat of September. The night before, Colbert’s finale, which drew a larger-than-normal audience, drew more than 6.7 million viewers.

The comparison isn’t apples to apples, as a late night host’s latest program is bound to draw a large audience, just as a rerun airing on a Friday night is not. The decision to launch Allen’s show on Fridays in Colbert’s timeslot was surprising, because none of the current late-night programs regularly air originals on Fridays, meaning audiences don’t regularly tune in in normal numbers.

Under CBS’ agreement with Allen, the entrepreneur and media owner will cover 100% of the production costs and pay CBS a fee for its use of the time period. Allen, in turn, sells the ads that appear alongside his shows. Regardless of the number of viewers or ratings for the period, CBS receives the same compensation.

All networks have had to grapple with how to handle late-night programming, which remains a staple of American culture and conversation but no longer attracts the audiences they once did when Johnny Carson, Letterman and Jay Leno held sway. According to Guideline, ad spend on late night TV shows fell to $209 million in 2025, compared to $519.7 million in 2017 – a drop of almost 60%. According to the company’s data, “The Late Show” accounted for 27% of all late-night TV show spending in 2025, and 29% of all spending so far in 2026.

With Colbert’s departure, many dollars that stayed with the daypart may migrate to digital, along with the viewers who previously watched the shows around midnight.