This is not my choice. So I don’t know how we’re going to land this plane, but people have asked me, “Well, what do you think you’re going to do next?” And the cleanest and really fullest answer I can give you, not that I don’t have thoughts, is, the honest answer is, I just want to land this plane gracefully in a way that I find satisfying, given how much effort we’ve put into it for the last 10 years. That’s a long answer. You want shorter answers or is that okay?
No, I love a longer answer. This is real life. So when they called you and told you—
They didn’t call me and tell me! My manager told me.
No one called you?
No. They told him. They told him, and he told me. He said, “Hey, do you have 15 minutes? I’m going to stop by.” And I said, “Sure.” So I got off and I said to my assistant, I said, “Baby Doll”—because my manager is James “Baby Doll” Dixon—“Baby Doll wants 15 minutes in person?” Usually, like, five minutes on the phone is an hour with him. And I said, “I’m super tired, I’m really exhausted. Just make sure this doesn’t go too long.” So when 15 minutes comes by, my assistant texted me. I said, “It might be a little longer.” I was so tired. I was lying down on my couch with a pillow over my eyes going, “Hey, James, what’s going on?” I was prone. And he said, “This is going to be the last season.” So I sat up and was like, “Oh, okay. Well, that’s interesting. I did not expect that.” And then we talked for hours. Because you don’t have that moment very often. And then I went home and my wife, who was expecting me home in 15 minutes, and she said, “That was two and a half hours.” She goes, “What happened? Did you get canceled?” And I said, “Yep.” So we sat down, she got me a drink, and we sat and talked about like, “Okay, what do you want to do next?” That was it.
Did the explanation provided to your manager make sense to you? What was it?
That they’re getting out of the late-night space altogether because it’s no longer profitable for the network. And I said, “Well, if we can’t be, then no one can be.” And look, they run the business and I run the show, and far be it for me to tell them how to run their business, but I’ll stick with: I found it very surprising.
And did you find what they said plausible? Do you believe it?
Television’s in huge trouble. Maybe David Ellison [CEO of Paramount Skydance] will fix everything. No, no. Seriously. Maybe he will. Maybe he’ll fix everything. But it’s clear that television is in a lot of transitions. It’s been going on for a long time. But that’s not my end of the business. My end of the business is the jokes.
If I have the sequence of events correct, CBS’s parent company, Paramount, pays President Donald Trump a settlement of $16 million, which you call the bribe on air, and then—
Please don’t get me a lawsuit here. I said, “I believe that there is a name for that. And it would be: big fat bribe.”
Shortly after that the show is canceled.
Two days later.
And immediately, politicians like Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff come out and say words to the effect of: If this was politically motivated, the American people deserve to know.
By the way, everything you’re telling me right now, you have to tell me right now. I don’t
read about myself. Who’d you say?
Adam Schiff and Elizabeth Warren.
Well, good for them. I mean, that’s not my job. That’s not my reaction to it. My reaction as a professional in show business is to go: That is the network’s decision. I can understand why people would have that reaction because CBS or the parent corporation—I’m not going to say who made that decision, because I don’t know; no one’s ever going to tell us—decided to cut a check for $16 million to the president of the United States over a lawsuit that their own lawyers, Paramount’s own lawyers, said is completely without merit. And it is self-evident that that is damaging to the reputation of the network, the corporation, and the news division. So it is unclear to me why anyone would do that other than to curry favor with a single individual. If people have theories that associate me with that, it’s a reasonable thing to think, because CBS or the corporation clearly did it once. But my side of the street is clean and I have no interest in picking up a broom or adding to refuse on the other side of the street. Not my problem. So people can have their theories. I have my feelings about not doing the show anymore, but you’d have to show me why that’s a fruitful relationship for me to have with my network for the next nine months, for me to engage in that speculation. I have had a great relationship with CBS. It’s one of the reasons why this was so surprising and so shocking that there was no preamble to this. We do budgets and everything like that. We’ve done cuts and stuff like that. So that’s why it was surprising to me, as I said, but I meant what I said [on air] the next night after I found out, because I couldn’t sit on it. They’ve been great partners. They really have. They’ve been very supportive. It took us six to nine months to find our legs. Even before people watched the show, we didn’t quite figure out what we wanted to do. It didn’t come fully assembled out of the box the way The Colbert Report did. And they stood by us and they were very supportive and they gave us what we needed and we found it and we delivered for them what we wanted. I want to do a good job.
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