David Letterman weighed in on the “Late Show With Stephen Colbert” cancellation on Tuesday, albeit in his own very Letterman-esque way. The former “Late Show” host and originator of the CBS program posted a 20-minute compilation of clips from his show where he made fun of the network, captioning the YouTube video, “You can’t spell CBS without BS.”
Titled “CBS: The Tiffany Network,” the video includes nearly a decade of zingers from Letterman against his network, and comes on the heels of CBS’ decision to cancel “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.”
Letterman stepped away from “The Late Show” in 2015, but as part of the lucrative deal that brought him to CBS in the first place, maintained ownership of video from his show through his Worldwide Pants production company. Hence the decision to create this new YouTube compilation slamming CBS, which you can watch above.
On Monday night, late night hosts rallied around Colbert after Thursday’s shocking announcement. Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart and John Oliver all appeared on “The Late Show” as part of a “kiss cam” bit, while Stewart devoted his entire “Daily Show” segment to supporting Colbert and dinging Paramount (which also owns “The Daily Show”) for its decision to scrap the late night host’s show.
“My God, when CDs stopped selling, they didn’t just go, ‘Oh well, music, it’s been a good run.’ The fact that CBS didn’t try to save their No. 1-rated network late night franchise that’s been on the air for over three decades is part of what’s making everybody wonder, was this purely financial, or maybe the path of least resistance for your $8 billion dollar merger?” Stewart said, referring to the planned merger of Paramount Global with David Ellison’s Skydance Media.
Colbert, meanwhile, took direct aim at his parent company as well on Monday night’s episode of “The Late Show.”
“Over the weekend, somebody at CBS followed up their gracious press release with a gracious anonymous leak saying they pulled the plug on our show because of losses pegged between $40 million and $50 million a year,” he said in his monologue. “$40 million is a big number. I could see us losing $24 million but where would Paramount have possibly spent the other $16 million? Oh, yeah,” Colbert joked, referring of course to the amount Paramount paid Donald Trump to settle the frivolous lawsuit he filed accusing “60 Minutes” of deceptively editing its Kamala Harris interview.
