Combative conservative commentator Megyn Kelly railed against Stephen Colbert and David Letterman on Friday for blasting CBS.
“I’m humiliated for him that he stayed on the air all this time,” Kelly said on her SiriusXM show. “He made the whole year about the fact that he was fired and was leaving,” she added, calling the host’s sentimental goodbye interviews and deferences from fellow late-night hosts “ridiculous.”
Letterman joined Colbert on The Late Show on Thursday, where the pair destroyed some “CBS property” by throwing it off the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater, and Letterman told the network, “To the folks at CBS, in the words of the great Ed Murrow, good night and good luck, motherf---ers.”
“The irony of having Letterman pretend that this wasn’t coming,” Kelly said Friday, “The late-night format collapsed while David Letterman was at the helm, and he knew he was handing what was effectively a loser to the next guy.”
“I mean, truly, it is bigger than Johnny Carson got,” she went on about Colbert’s send-offs. “And I was there when Johnny Carson stepped down. I remember what happened. Like, this is absurd. Why are they pretending that this is some sort of temple? That is how this feels. It’s a damn late-night show that had complete irrelevance except for a very small sliver of committed far-lefts,” she raged on.
She also agreed with her guest, former The Intercept editor-turned-MAGA proponent Glenn Greenwald, who argued that Colbert’s show had “completely turned themselves into basically like a celebrity guest version of whatever is on MSNBC” and that the late-night hosts see themselves as “martyrs.”
Letterman, who created the franchise and hosted the show for 22 years before he handed the reins to Colbert in 2015, made his second-ever appearance on Colbert’s version of the show to mark the franchise’s end and help the host bid farewell before his show’s last episode on May 21.
Colbert has filled the few episodes leading up to the finale with special appearances and surprise guests. Jon Stewart, Steven Spielberg, David Byrne, and Bruce Springsteen will appear on the show next week. The full lineup was not released to leave surprises for the audience.
This week, in addition to Letterman, Colbert hosted former president Barack Obama and fellow late-night hosts John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, and Jimmy Kimmel, with whom he banded together to revive their Strike Force Five podcast. In the episode, he revealed that his staff is “fired” immediately following their last episode—and that he would have to clear the building by the following Friday.
Kelly argued that too much was being made of Colbert’s cancellation, given the network’s claim that The Late Show cost them $40 million a year. “They had the nerve to cancel his failing show,” Kelly said Friday. “They’re very, very angry. Very angry that he’s got to go,” she added, “And now they want to pretend that they had a smash success on their hands.”
Kimmel called the $40 million a year number “nonsensical” in August, adding, “There’s just not a snowball’s chance in hell that that’s anywhere near accurate.” Letterman called CBS “lying weasels” after Paramount said the show was canceled for “purely financial” reasons.
