David Letterman has weighed in on CBS’ decision to replace the 33-year-old “The Late Show” series with Byron Allen’s comedy talk show “Comics Unleashed.” The network confirmed the change earlier this month. Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” will air its final episode on May 21st. Allen will take over the 11:35pm ET slot on May 22nd to air back-to-back episodes of “Comics Unleashed.”
“They don’t want to spend money, so they’re going to make money,” Letterman said of the decision on a recent episode of his podcast. “They’re charging Byron Allen a good price. He’s selling all the ads for “Comics Unleashed.” It’s probably going to be a 90-minute, two-hour comic telling funny things.”
“This show is a really good idea,” Letterman added. “It’s all panel meetings. Nobody’s doing stand-up except sitting and doing stand-up.”
“Comics Unleashed” currently airs on CBS after Colbert’s “The Late Show.” Mr. Allen will continue his 12:37 a.m. comedy game show, “Funny You Should Ask,” even though the broadcast time is moved up an hour to replace the late-night show. The time purchase agreement runs through the 2026-2027 television season.
Letterman started CBS’s “The Late Show” series in 1993 and hosted it for 22 years before passing the baton to Stephen Colbert, who debuted in September 2015. When the network announced its shocking decision to cancel “The Late Show” last summer, Letterman’s team responded by posting a 20-minute supercut on its YouTube page featuring every episode in which the network criticized CBS or made jokes at its expense on the air. The supercut’s caption read, “You can’t spell CBS without BS.”
Last July, Colbert announced that CBS would not only cancel reruns of “The Late Show,” but the entire series through May 2026. The decision was reportedly “financial,” but industry insiders soon began to question whether politics were involved, given Colbert’s regular on-air attacks on Donald Trump and the fact that CBS’s parent company, Paramount Global, was trying to get a merger with Skydance approved at the time.
“This is total cowardice,” Letterman later said of the cancellation in a YouTube video. “They didn’t do the right thing. They didn’t treat Stephen Colbert, the face of that network, the way he deserved to be treated.”
