Is Taylor Tomlinson Really the Reason Stephen Colbert was Canceled?

According to new reporting from LateNighter, there’s even more to the cancellation of The Late Show and it doesn’t have to do with the Colbert-Trump drama, the alleged millions being lost by the show or Stephen Colbert’s relationship with CBS and Paramount. Instead, there’s evidence that CBS is just giving up on late-night programming completely. The proof comes from the network’s decision to simply end After Midnight, hosted by Taylor Tomlinson, after she declined to return for a third season of the show. 

The show had already been renewed for a third season when it was canceled — like with The Late Show, instead of bothering to look for a different host, they nixed After Midnight altogether. The Paramount executive George Cheeks, who has already been linked to Colbert’s departure and is now overseeing South Park and who can’t commit to Jon Stewart’s future at Comedy Central, is also at the center of this new information. 

In a meeting with the press following the completion of the SkyDance-Paramount merger last week, Cheeks reportedly said that Tomlinson’s departure made CBS realize they “couldn’t stay in that daypart.”

There’s plenty to interpret in the statement. LateNighter theorized it could mean that Cheeks blamed Tomlinson’s departure for the end of The Late Show either because CBS planned to replace Colbert with Tomlinson — or that CBS having two late-night shows would have maintained a “status quo” in their programming that flew out of whack after Tomlinson left After Midnight. Plus, there’s the little fact that Colbert’s production company was one of the producers of After Midnight. 

Any way you slice Cheeks’ comment, there’s an implication that Tomlinson was irreplaceable for the network, and that somehow, her absence was at least a small factor in choosing to end Colbert and the entire Late Show franchise. That’s very flattering for Tomlinson, but hard to really reason with from a programming perspective. If After Midnight was performing well with a younger audience, isn’t there a world where CBS could have kept the program with another young comedian? Was it just not worth it to try to find that person? Did auditioning a bunch of TikTok famous crowdwork comedians not appeal to the casting directors at CBS? Or did testing show it just wouldn’t work without Tomlinson? 

Canceling the entire show certainly went against Tomlinson’s wishes. “You know it was my dream that I would get to finish out this season and hand it off to a new host,” Tomlinson said in her farewell monologue on After Midnight. “I really wanted CBS to replace me because I just think there are so many amazing comedians who would have done a great job with this show.”

Of course, there’s a third reading of Cheeks’ comment: Once CBS cut After Midnight, the network got a taste for blood. What could be more convenient and cost efficient than just giving up? You can’t lose money on late-night programming if you go dark after 11:30 p.m. There might be zero reward, but there’s also zero risk. Not having to recast for Tomlinson paved an easier, cheaper path for CBS.

And as we’ve seen, cheap and easy is the preferred operating procedure for corporate executives. Capitulation to Trump might have just been the tasty bonus.