Stephen Colbert’s Late Show replacement is a depressing sign of the times

Colbert’s replacement debuts with less than half of Late Show’s average viewership

CBS's debut of *Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen* drew 995,000 viewers in the Late Show timeslot, down 63% from Colbert's 2.7M average and trailing both NBC's Fallon (1.5M) and ABC's Kimmel (1.6M). The collapse signals that late night audiences are format-loyal, not network-loyal — CBS shed its political-satire demographic without capturing Allen's own claimed base, a cautionary data point for any media brand executing a hard editorial pivot.