I find the article a little ridiculous. "Chilling" is being used to describe the end of late night television for commercial reasons. People aren't watching late night TV as much, and the advertising is not there - that isn't chilling; that's the world we live in.

The way the article is written you'd think late night TV is an irreplaceable cultural touchstone. It's nonsense - people have stopped watching so it's already no longer a touchstone.

This is from Wikipedia on rival Tonight Shows ratings in 2006:

2006, The Tonight Show led in ratings for the 11th consecutive season, with a nightly average of 5.7 million viewers – 31% of the total audience in that time slot – compared to 4.2 million viewers for Late Show with David Letterman, 3.4 million for Nightline and 1.6 million for Jimmy Kimmel Live!.

In 2025, Colbert is leading the ratings with 2.42m - less than half the audience for 1st place in 2006 - and now we're in a time where TV advertising has declined massively in value.

Look at the TV ratings for 2024/2025 and network TV has collapsed. The most watched shows are Netflix. And even the few Network TV shows that break the top 20 are getting way fewer viewers than 20 years ago. Plus they're skewed to older viewers that are not valuable to the advertisers. The demographic they want - 18-35 - don't watch TV any more, and they certainly don't sit down every night to watch late night TV shows.

So Colbert's Late Show being cancelled is more a sign of the times. Network TV is dying and it's dying fast. The merger itself between Skydance and Paramount/CBS is itself a sign of the times - one billionaire media family is exiting old media (the Redstone family) which another is buying into it (the Ellis family). But Paramount and CBS are not doing well - Paramount global has declining revenues, declining assets and made an operating loss of $5.3bn. The big media conglomerates failed to move fast enough with the times; Netflix has won the streaming wars while traditional TV and Cinema is in massive decline. These companies don't have any answers - they're just managing declines while new companies will come along and take advantage of the new world.

Colbert's show was in 1st place and it was cancelled to save money. I wouldn't be surprised if there are further cancellations although for now I suspect the networks will wait to see where the audience of the Late Show lands. But one of the shows (Jimmy Kimmel's I think?) house band was sacked last year to save money - the writing is on the wall.

It's possible the politics of the merger played a role but even if that's the case, it shows that the value of the Late Show has declined so much for Paramount/CBS that they could dump it easily.