Late-night TV is drowning, and legendary host Conan O’Brien is enraged by the Trump-friendly executives who are pushing it further underwater.
“I’m of the mind that yes, these shows are going away and will become something else,” O’Brien, 62, said in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “But I don’t like when other malign forces intervene, because they’re trying to curry favor. That p***es me off.”
One “malign force” O’Brien was referring to is Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison, who purchased CBS last summer.
In July 2025, CBS settled a $16 million lawsuit with President Donald Trump in the midst of its negotiations with the MAGA-friendly Ellison.
Just two weeks after that settlement—and less than a month before Ellison, 43, took over the network—CBS announced that it would not be renewing The Late Show host Stephen Colbert’s contract, which ends in May.
Though CBS told Colbert that his cancellation was “purely a financial decision,” it appeared to be a thinly veiled attempt to appease the Trump-aligned FCC to secure approval of the Ellison buyout. At the time, Trump claimed that Paramount had offered him an additional $16 million in “advertising.” Paramount has denied any such deal.
The Emmy-winning Late Show host believed his politics caused a problem for his new boss, calling the settlement “a big, fat bribe.”
Colbert’s predecessor, David Letterman–who created The Late Show franchise and hosted the CBS program for 22 years before passing the baton to Colbert—called the network’s decision “gutless.”
Now, Ellison is once again sucking up to Trump over a new $111 billion merger between his Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery—as he will need government approval for the purchase to proceed.
Colbert, 61, has been a vocal critic of Trump, filling his late-night monologues with political satire about the president. He also frequently welcomes politicians and other guests who regularly speak out against the president, including Democratic Texas congressional hopeful James Talarico and California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Silencing a political voice like Colbert could prove essential to Ellison’s blockbuster Hollywood merger.
Colbert, who delivered a few parting jabs at Trump in a WGA Awards speech on Sunday, told The Hollywood Reporter that “Conan is the patron saint of ex-talk show hosts.”
“He’d actually been telling me to quit for years. We were out, a few Emmys ago, and he kept saying, ‘I want you to know there’s a lot of fun to be had when this is over, so don’t feel like you need to stay.’ It almost hurt my feelings, but he was just being kind. He Dutch uncle’d me,” Colbert said.
In 2021, O’Brien ended his nearly 30-year career on late-night. In the half-decade since, he has created one of the most listened to podcasts in the world, Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend; won two Emmys for his HBO Max travel show, Conan O’Brien Must Go, which is an offshoot of the podcast; and will host the Oscars for a second consecutive year on Sunday, March 15.
O’Brien credits his post-late-night career flourish to a lack of sentimentality.
“I try not to get sentimental about change,” he told THR. “There are no good old days. There is only change.”
The six-time Emmy winner said his late-night fears were confirmed during his viral 2024 appearance on the YouTube talk show Hot Ones.
“If a guy can do World Series numbers with overhead that looked, to me, to be about $600, and you have every big star lining up to do his show or Chicken Shop Date‚" O’Brien said, “that’s when I profoundly understood that late-night shows are in trouble.”
“That was the moment the scales fell from my eyes,” he concluded.
