CBS claims replacing Stephen Colbert 's late-night show with a comedy roundtable series from entrepreneur Byron Allen has shifted the timeslot from a money loser into a money maker.

A little more than one week after The Late Show with Stephen Colbert aired its star-studded and highly anticipated finale on May 21, after eleven years on the air, the network replaced it with Allen's Comics Unleashed the following night. Although Variety reports the series debuted to tepid ratings in the timeslot, the network told the outlet that Allen's new business model is turning a profit.

"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," the company told the outlet in a statement. "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."

It's unclear if those numbers are currently coming in for the network or are merely projections based on the new model. The outlet reports that, unlike Colbert, Allen is dumping a significant portion of his own money into the new "time buy" model.

Under the new arrangement, Allen pays for 100% of the production costs as well as a fee to CBS to use the former Late Show timeslot. Allen, in turn, sells advertising on his Comics Unleashed . As a result, CBS gets paid the same amount no matter what the ratings are, as long as Allen continues to foot the bill for production and the timeslot fee.

The new system helps the network maintain its reasoning for canceling The Late Show after a storied history in late-night TV that began with David Letterman launching the show in 1993. When it announced the news in July of 2025 that it was canceling Colbert's show, the network stated that it was a multi-million-dollar money loser.

However, CBS has faced criticism that the move was done to appease and, as Variety puts it, "flatter" President Donald Trump after it paid him a $16 million settlement over a lawsuit and had an $8 billion merger deal before the Federal Communications Commission, which was approved days after Colbert's cancellation news broke.

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