David Letterman’s longtime head writer and executive producer, Rob Burnett, still can’t believe that CBS not only fired Stephen Colbert but canceled The Late Show altogether.
“This is just unconscionable to me,” Burnett said on Obsessed: The Podcast after The Late Show aired its last episode in May. “You have the number one show in late-night television. You have Stephen Colbert. Does it get better than Stephen Colbert? I don’t think so.”
Burnett, 63, whose new movie, In Memoriam, just premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival, echoed his former boss’s scathing rebuke of the show’s network, CBS, which Letterman excoriated for claiming Colbert’s show was canceled for “purely financial” reasons.
Burnett was a writer, then head writer, then executive producer while working on Letterman’s Late Show across its entire 22-year run from 1993 to Colbert’s takeover in 2015, winning four Emmys along the way. Before that, he began his career as an intern for Letterman’s NBC show Late Night.
He told Obsessed that the end of the Late Show franchise would have been “sad” even if Colbert “left on his own terms.” But seeing it end in what many interpret as a corporate favor to Donald Trump makes it much worse.
“This is unbelievable,” Burnett said. “And then, the gall of CBS and Paramount, to say, ‘There were financial reasons.’ That’s all. Well, what do they think, we’re idiots? We’re not idiots. So it’s horrible. There’s no other way to say it.”
Colbert’s show was the most-watched late-night show for nine consecutive years before the host declared Paramount’s $16.5 settlement payout a “big, fat bribe” as it pursued a merger with Trump-friendly company Skydance last July. Days later, Paramount announced that not only was it not renewing Colbert’s contract, which ended in May 2026, but it was also shuttering The Late Show altogether.
As one of Trump’s fiercest critics on late-night, Trump made it publicly known that he would like to see Colbert go off the air.
In 2024, Trump called the host a “complete and total loser,” and declared that “CBS should terminate his contract and pick almost anyone, right off the street, who would do better, and for FAR LESS MONEY.” He gloated when the announcement was made the following year, writing on Truth Social that Colbert was “fired was a pure lack of TALENT.”
Burnett scoffed at CBS, which he said played right into Trump’s hands. “You have an administration that has decided to take someone off the air because they didn’t like what he was saying. I mean, what country are we living in now?” he said. “This is not how things should be.”
Despite not having been part of Colbert’s version of the show, Burnett said he still feels connected to its legacy.
“When you leave a stage, you don’t think the person that’s gonna come after you is gonna be able to do what you did, if you’re honest about it,” he shared. “That’s just the egomaniacs that we all are in show business. And oddly, I found myself being really proud, retroactively, of the association with Colbert. That’s what I felt a lot of when he was leaving there was, you know, we’re all part of this Late Show.”
“If he had been something less, I wouldn’t have felt good about it,” he added. “But I actually feel happy that our show and his show will forever be linked.”
The idea of legacy plays a major role in Burnett’s film In Memoriam, which stars comedian Marc Maron as a mid-tier actor who finds out he’s dying of cancer and becomes consumed by a quest to get into the Oscars’ In Memoriam montage.
It’s a collaboration 30 years in the making after Burnett helped give Maron his late-night stand-up debut on The Late Show in 1996. The second he saw a tape of Maron performing, he said, “book that guy.”
“And he came out, and he crushed, so that was great.” Burnett said, before joking, “And then we decided, 30 years later, we would do a movie together, and he’s a man of his word.”
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