Stephen Colbert’s friend and former “The Daily Show” colleague Samantha Bee says she’s “shocked, not surprised” that CBS canceled Colbert’s “The Late Show.”
Not only because of the show’s reported financial problems, but because CBS parent company Paramount Global needed to curry favor with Donald Trump in order to win approval for the upcoming merger with Skydance Media.
Bee’s comments came Tuesday while appearing on the “Breaking Bread With Tom Papa” podcast. Asked by Papa about whether money, or Trump was to blame, Bee said, “I think both things are just true and real. Like it definitely was hemorrhaging money… You know, these legacy shows, they are hemorrhaging their money with no real end to that,” Bee said in part.
The former “Full Frontal” host argued that part of this is the changing nature of how people consume media, and how that has in turn changed what they’re seeking from entertainment. “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. Yeah, [they’re] very well versed in what has happened. They’d really rather watch people just absolutely murder each other in a South Korean game show, watching people fall off cliffs to relax at night, before nodding off,” she said, referencing Netflix’s global hit “Squid Game.”
She also argued that paying close attention to politics isn’t “a national sport” like it might once have been. But, she added, “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.”
Bee then explained to Papa how when she was hosting “Full Frontal” on TBS, she frequently faced pressure from the business side of the show’s corporate parent due to the multiple mergers that happened during the show’s 7-year run.
“Nobody wants to cause trouble. You can’t, business trumps everything. It doesn’t matter what your values are. It doesn’t matter how important you think legacy media is, none of that f—ing matters. You’re talking about people, hundreds of millionaires and billionaires, literally making their business transactions. Everything you think that is important is absolutely impotent, not even a consideration.”
Bee also speculated that Paramount Global executives “had many agonizing conversations about what they were going to do to turn the ship around, what they were going to do to make the show profitable again. And that’s true probably of all the shows, you know, how do we make this profitable? But the extra element of it is that it’s so much easier for them to cut it loose with this merger coming down the pike. It makes the decision such a no brainer. And probably the most agonizing decisions they were having were about, ‘how do we float this? Like, how do we not get a lot of blowback?’ Sure they knew it was happening a long time ago, right? And the considerations were, like, ‘how can we position it so that the story can be not as bad as it could be?”
“It’s awful,” Bee added. “I know so many people who work there, I love Stephen. I consider him to be a friend. I think he’s amazing. So I’m shocked, not surprised.”
Watch the full conversation below:
