Samantha Bee doesn’t find it surprising that CBS decided to cancel The Late Show with Stephen Colbert amid the Paramount and Skydance merger.
The former late-night talk show host made an appearance on the Breaking Bread with Tom Papa podcast where she gave her take on Colbert’s show getting cancelled.
Papa noted that the show was losing $40 million a year and that the show’s “parent company is trying to curry favor with the president” over the merger.
“I think both things are true,” Bee said. “It definitely was hemorrhaging money. These legacy shows are hemorrhaging money with no real end to that — in sight, people are just not tuning in.”
She continued, “People are literally on their phones all the time for one thing, so they actually don’t necessarily need a recap of the day’s events. They’re very well-versed in what has happened.”
Bee said that viewers are now more interested in watching “people just absolutely murder each other in a South Korean game show” or “watching people fall off cliffs to relax at night before nodding off,” in addition to changing viewing habits.
“It is also true that when the president of the United States has to give his sign off on a corporate merger, the thing you can’t do is make jokes about him. He’s a thin-skinned idiot and we know he’s like a pernicious cancer and he cares about that stuff,” she added.
Bee recalled that during the time she hosted Full Frontal, there were several mergers, and “it was a constant source of conversation,” about not causing any trouble amid the multi-billion dollar transactions.
“It’s so much easier for them to cut it loose with this merger coming down the pike,” she said. “It makes the decision such a no-brainer, and probably the most agonizing decisions they were having were about how do we float this? How do we not get a lot of blowback? I’m sure they knew it was happening a long time ago.”
Bee said that the decision to end The Late Show was “awful” as she knows a lot of the people that work there, adding, “I love Stephen. I consider him to be a friend. I think he’s amazing. I’m shocked, not surprised.”
Watch Bee’s full interview in the video below.
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