Former late night host David Letterman used his YouTube channel to shade CBS’s decision to cancel his successor,Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show.
Since debuting on NBC with Late Night, Letterman has maintained a decades-long relationship with CBS, which he joined in August 1993, following NBC's offer of Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show to Jay Leno.
A leading ratings contender in the so-called “Talk Show Wars,” Letterman had voiced his criticisms of his second network home in his monologues, which he included in a montage video captioned:
“You can’t spell CBS without BS.”
In the video titled “CBS: The Tiffany Network,” Letterman featured footage of him roasting the TV network during his hosting stint up until May 2015. Stephen Colbert was announced as Letterman’s successor to The Late Show in April 2014 and has maintained the highest-rated American late night talk show since it premiered in 2016.
Posted on Monday, you can watch Letterman’s 20-minute video compilation in response Colbert's cancellation below:
- YouTube Letterman/YouTube
The montage features jokes from Letterman’s Late Show episodes spanning 1994, 2003, 2004, 2007, 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013. Despite all of his snarky remarks, CBS did not cancel Letterman's show…until Colbert's highly publicized Late Show cancellation on July 17th, with the network citing it as “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.”
According to Paramount, even though Colbert’s show was the top-rated late night show, it was losing over $40 million a year. The network had also recently canceled The Late Late Show with James Corden in 2023 and After Midnight with Taylor Tomlinson in June of this year.
Perhaps the writing was on the wall for the CBS late night shows, but the timing of it all is certainly...suspicious.
Earlier this summer, the network’s parent company, Paramount Global, agreed to pay President Donald Trump $16 million in a settlement over its conflicted 60 Minutes episode with then-presidential candidate and Vice President Kamala Harris. The high settlement offer was made while Paramount seeked approval from the Federal Communications Commission on a multi-billion-dollar deal to merge with Skydance Media, a deal which since been approved.
Lambasted as political extortion, a group of Democratic senators issued the following joint statement:
"Rewarding Trump with tens of millions of dollars for filing this bogus lawsuit will not cause him to back down on his war against the media and a free press."
"It will only embolden him to shake down, extort, and silence CBS and other media outlets that have the courage to report about issues that Trump may not like."
Skydance, a Hollywood movie studio best known for producing the Mission: Impossible films, is owned by David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison and co-founder of Oracle, which is worth over $231 billion.
Interestingly, he also happens to be a major Trump supporter. When Trump first ran in 2016, Ellison offered his early support and was involved in negotiations during the president’s first term to strip TikTok of its Chinese ownership.
Flash forward to his return from summer break on July 14th, when a mustachioed and hilarious Stephen Colbert mocked Paramount for their settlement with Trump in his monologue, quipping:
“As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I am offended. I don’t know if anything — anything — will repair my trust in this company…But, just taking a stab at it, I’d say $16 million would help.”
At almost 3 million views, you can watch that part of Colbert’s monologue here:
- YouTube The Late Show/YouTube
The line was what was rumored to be the final straw for Paramount Global before canceling Colbert’s show. So, maybe Letterman is onto something about the network sacrificing The Late Show to appease the Trump administration’s censorship of media that criticizes the president.
And regarding his relationship with Donald Trump, Letterman has long expressed regret for ever hosting the then-real estate mogul on both NBC’s Late Night and CBS’s The Late Show more than 30 times. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter’s Awards Chatter podcast in 2019, he discussed how he had no idea from Trump’s first appearance on his show in 1987 that he was a “soulless bastard.”
Also calling Trump “psychotic,” Letterman emphasized his disbelief in who Trump turned out to be, saying:
“He used to be kind of like the boob of New York that pretended to be wealthy, or we thought was wealthy, and now he’s just a psychotic. Is that putting too fine a point on it?”
Point taken, Letterman.
Although he supported the show by posting a video response to its cancellation on his channel, there are no plans yet for Letterman to appear at the Ed Sullivan Theater to support Colbert before his show’s farewell in May 2026.
But, fingers and toes crossed, they’ll reunite in the coming months.
Fans commented on Letterman’s video, praising the late night host for calling out CBS and speaking truth to power.
@CJFerg81/YouTube
@danieldougan269/YouTube
@KrisRowberry/YouTube
@phamphusi.2003/YouTube
@ChristopherDazey/YouTube
@MikesOrganicVideos/YouTube
@rhymeswithsomethingy4766/YouTube
@wonderboy8917/YouTube
@JohnnyRempit/YouTube
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@DwRockett/YouTube
@de-fault_de-fault/YouTube
And Letterman wasn’t the only talk show host to support Colbert.
In the Late Show episode from Monday, several familiar hosts joined in a surprise performance with Lin-Manuel Miranda and “Weird Al” Yankovic in a parody of the infamous Coldplay affair scandal, including Anderson Cooper, Andy Cohen, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, Jon Stewart and John Oliver.
You can watch the funny bit below:
- YouTube The Late Show/YouTube
@SecretaryBurgum/X
@Doug Ellin/X
@evanrachelwood/Instagram