Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show finale put CBS atop the late-night ratings charts. His replacement’s premiere plummeted them to the bottom.
When Colbert, 62, left CBS on Thursday, so too did all of his viewers. The first episode of Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed to premiere at Colbert’s previous 11:35 pm time slot drew just 995,000 viewers, according to initial Nielsen data reported by LateNighter.
By comparison, Colbert’s series finale attracted more than 6.7 million viewers via the same metric, meaning CBS saw an 85 percent downturn in viewership just one day after Colbert’s show went dark for good.
Comics Unleashed also failed to match any of its late-night peers, with Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon each earning more than 1.5 million viewers on the same night. And while Fallon aired a new episode, Kimmel’s was a rerun.
According to Allen Media Group, the billionaire media mogul’s TV company, Allen’s comedy panel show beat Kimmel, 58, and Fallon, 51, in specific local markets, though the Nielsen data used in its graphic is cherry-picked by targeted demographics.
All ratings information is awaiting a more extensive calculation once delayed-viewing data becomes available.
On Thursday, nearly 7 million people tuned in to watch Colbert roast Trump, 79, interview celebrities like Paul Rudd, Bryan Cranston, and his late-night compatriots, and perform Beatles songs with Paul McCartney. It was Colbert’s most-watched weeknight show in the show’s 11-year history, more than doubling his season average.
In April, CBS revealed that Allen, 65, had purchased Colbert’s marquee timeslot for “tens of millions,” where he would air his show, Comics Unleashed, and sell his own commercial space directly to advertisers. The show will be followed by another one of Allen’s programs, Funny You Should Ask, giving the billionaire two hours of uninterrupted airtime on CBS.
In an interview with NPR before the show’s new timeslot debut, Allen foresaw the ratings dip.
“At the end of the day, I’m not trying to replace Colbert,” Allen said last week. “I am not trying to hold on to his audience because Comics Unleashed has been around 20 years and has its own audience."
“Not everybody’s gonna love me. Not everyone’s going to love the fact that I’m not being racist or antisemitic or sexist,” he continued. “But there is that one or two percent that would be like ‘Hell yeah, I’m rolling with you,’ and I learned that at an early age, and by the way, that simple lesson made me a billionaire.”
For Comics Unleashed‘s May 22 timeslot debut, Allen premiered a new half-hour featuring comedians Hannah Dickinson, Mark Smalls, Lance Woods, and Joe Sib. The show’s second half hour was a rerun of an episode that originally aired on September 30, 2025.
According to a press release, the show has followed that format in all shows since.
Less than 24 hours after Colbert left The Late Show‘s Ed Sullivan Theater, the now-former late-night host made a surprise appearance on a local, public access TV show, Only in Monroe.
In the four days since it premiered on Colbert’s YouTube channel, the episode has over 928,000 views—nearly as many as his replacement’s nationally syndicated TV broadcast.
