CBS Hands Its Late-Night Slot to Byron Allen After Colbert’s Final Bow
Quick Reads
- CBS has officially handed its 11:35 p.m. late-night slot to Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed, starting May 22, one day after Stephen Colbert’s final episode.
- The deal is a time buy arrangement through the 2026–2027 TV season, meaning Allen’s Allen Media Group pays CBS for the airtime and sells its own advertising.
- Allen’s comedy game show Funny You Should Ask, hosted by Jon Kelley, will fill the 12:35 a.m. slot in the same arrangement.
- The move marks CBS’s formal exit from the late-night talk business after more than three decades and, according to insiders, will make the network profitable in the slot for the first time.
- CBS canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert last July in what it called a purely financial decision, though the timing days after Colbert criticized a Paramount settlement with Donald Trump, drew significant controversy.
Byron Allen is taking over CBS late night. The network has confirmed a time buy deal with Allen’s Allen Media Group, bringing two back-to-back half-hours of Comics Unleashed to the 11:35 p.m. slot starting May 22, the morning after Stephen Colbert hosts his final episode of The Late Show.
The arrangement covers the 2026–2027 television season. Under a time buy model, Allen pays CBS for the airtime and retains the right to sell advertising in the block himself, rather than CBS bearing the costs of producing its own original late-night programming. His comedy game show Funny You Should Ask will follow at 12:35 a.m. under the same structure.
The shift is, by any measure, a seismic one for American late night. CBS has been home to a late-night franchise since 1993, when David Letterman moved to the network from NBC. Colbert took over from Letterman in 2015 and grew The Late Show into the top-rated program in the slot. CBS announced the cancellation in July 2025, framing it as a business decision made against what Paramount executives called a declining advertising market for late night. Paramount Chair of TV Media George Cheeks later said it was simply not sustainable to continue but that framing was widely challenged.
The cancellation came three days after Colbert publicly criticized a $16 million settlement Paramount reached with Donald Trump, a settlement Colbert called a “big fat bribe” on air. Trump posted on social media that he “absolutely loved” that Colbert had been fired. Senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in Variety that the sequence of events had the appearance of “bribery in plain sight.” The Writers Guild of America called for a formal investigation. CBS was later criticized again in February when it blocked an interview with Texas State Representative James Talarico from airing, reportedly out of concern over FCC retribution, a move that backfired when the clip went viral on YouTube, accumulating more than 9.3 million views.
Allen, for his part, made clear from the start that he wanted the slot. He publicly raised his hand at New York’s Advertising Week event in October 2025, just months after the cancellation was announced. “Fifty years, I have been waiting for this moment,” he said at the time. He had already been leasing the 12:35 a.m. hour from CBS with Comics Unleashed, a position that gave him an existing foothold on the network and proved the time buy model could work for both parties.
