In an attempt to get some positive press after making good on pulling Stephen Colbert’s popular “The Late Show” off the air and replacing it with Byron Allen’s “Comics Unleashed,” CBS issued a press statement claiming it was a sound business decision despite a massive drop in viewership.
According to a report from the Daily Beast, CBS claimed on Thursday the unpopular move represented sound business strategy, stating: "We're proud to partner with Byron Allen on a new business and programming model for late night that proactively addresses a network daypart that was cost-prohibitive to continue. With this 'time buy' model, we have shifted an hour that was losing roughly $40 million annually to $15 million in profit — a $55 million swing."
The network reiterated its assertion that canceling Colbert's show had been "purely a financial decision," which skeptical late-night competitor Jimmy Kimmel had already rejected, stating: "There's just not a snowball's chance in hell that that's anywhere near accurate," Kimmel said. "The idea that Stephen Colbert's show was losing $40 million a year is beyond nonsensical."
According to an earlier report from The Beast, "Comics Unleashed" drew only 995,000 viewers in its debut episode, while late-night talk shows hosted by Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon topped more than 1.5 million viewers on the same night — and notably, Kimmel's was a rerun, not a fresh broadcast.
Even more embarrassingly for CBS, Colbert's YouTube presence continues to outperform Allen's new show, the report added. A one-night appearance by Colbert on the public access TV show "Only in Monroe" drew 928,000 views on his YouTube channel alone — a figure that doesn't include viewers on other platforms.
