On Monday’s episode of Radio Andy’s “Andy Cohen Live,” Andy Cohen and co-host John Hill talked about the surprising news that CBS cancelled “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”
“I think it is possible that it’s losing money,” Andy said when asked if he believed CBS was losing $40 million a year on the show, “and typically what would happen if a show is losing money that is also super important to the network — which that show and the late-night time slot have been important to CBS for the last 25 years since Letterman began it on CBS at the Ed Sullivan Theater in like the mid-90s — what they would probably do is say, ‘Listen, Stephen, your show is losing X amount of money a year. There’s two things we could do. We could cut the budget in half, maybe move out of the Ed Sullivan Theater, do the show in a small studio that we already own,’ because CBS has a lot of studio space … ‘Cut down on staff. You have 200 people working here. We need it to be 100 people or 60. And instead of you doing your show five days a week, we’re gonna do your show four days a week, and you’re gonna gonna pre-tape your Thursday show, so you’re actually gonna be in production three days a week.’”
He added, “That’s a way right there to cut the budget at least in half.”
“You don’t jump straight to cancelling,” John said, and Andy agreed it was strange that the network seemed to have blindsided Colbert with the cancellation decision.
When John asked if the timing of the announcement seemed strange, Andy said, “Or they would say, ‘Stephen, by the end of the year, we need to make these cuts, and we’ll give you another year, but we want to give you another year or two with all these cuts, and then we’re gonna see. We’re gonna cut our losses, and if you wind up losing X amount,’ whatever.”
He continued, “Instead, they’re turning the lights out completely at 11:30, which says to me, it’s like CBS is just cooked. I mean, it’s just — it is cooked. They are saying, ‘We are done.’”
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