It ended not with a grand farewell, but with a sterile press release. In July 2025, CBS announced that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, a cultural touchstone and a bastion of liberal sanity through years of political tumult, would air its final episode in May 2026. The reason, according to Paramount Chair of TV Media George Cheeks, was “purely a financial decision.” The show, despite its consistent ratings, was reportedly losing $40 million a year. It was a cold, pragmatic end to a passionate, decade-long run. For the network, it was a line item crossed off a balance sheet. For millions of viewers, it felt like a surrender.
But Stephen Colbert wasn’t surrendering. He was reloading.
Just weeks after the news of the CBS cancellation sent shockwaves through the media landscape, a 90-second video appeared online. There was Colbert, not in his familiar Ed Sullivan Theater, but somewhere starker, more intimate. Beside him sat the formidable U.S. Representative from Texas, Jasmine Crockett, a politician whose meteoric rise was fueled by her refusal to suffer fools in Congress. The video was slick, defiant, and promised a new venture: Unfiltered with Colbert & Crockett. The tagline: “Truth, laughter, and no filter.” Within 24 hours, it had 10 million views. The message was clear. This wasn’t just a Stephen Colbert comeback; it was the start of a war for the soul of late-night.
The abrupt cancellation of The Late Show was, on its surface, a symptom of a larger industry illness. The late-night format, a holdover from the golden age of broadcast, has been bleeding viewers for years. Audiences have fragmented, migrating to YouTube clips, TikTok summaries, and podcasts that fit neatly into their commutes. CBS’s logic, at least publicly, was sound. Why hemorrhage cash on a format whose core demographic is aging out, when that money could be invested elsewhere?
Yet, the decision felt shortsighted to many, and suspicious to some. Colbert’s show wasn’t just a collection of monologue jokes and celebrity interviews; it was a nightly catharsis for a significant portion of the country. His incisive, often furious, critiques of the Trump administration and its allies made him a polarizing figure, but also an essential one. The quiet removal of such a powerful voice raised inevitable questions about whether the network’s decision was truly just about money, or if political pressure had finally made Colbert too costly in more ways than one.
Whatever the reason, CBS fundamentally miscalculated the man they had just fired. Colbert, a student of media and power, had spent his career deconstructing the very systems of authority that now sought to discard him. He wasn’t going to open a quiet bookstore in Montclair. Instead, he found a partner who understood the new rules of engagement.
Enter Jasmine Crockett. A sophomore congresswoman from Dallas, Crockett became a progressive icon not through carefully crafted policy papers, but through viral moments of unvarnished confrontation. Her 2024 evisceration of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene during a House Oversight Committee hearing—a masterclass in verbal jujitsu that became a national headline—cemented her reputation as a political firebrand who could wield social media with surgical precision. Her appearances on The Late Show had showcased a sharp wit and an easy chemistry with Colbert. She wasn’t just a politician who could land a punchline; she was a performer who understood that in the modern media ecosystem, authenticity is the only currency that matters.
The partnership, born from a rumored meeting at a 2024 charity event, is a symbiotic masterpiece. Colbert brings the institutional credibility, the production prowess, and a massive, loyal audience hungry for his return. Crockett brings the raw, insurgent energy of modern politics, an innate understanding of digital media, and a connection to a younger, more diverse audience that traditional late-night has struggled to capture. The result is the Jasmine Crockett show that political junkies have dreamed of, merged with the late-night format Colbert perfected.
The teaser for Unfiltered was a direct shot across the bow of their former corporate parent. “The suits think they can silence us,” Colbert said with his signature smirk, a line that was as much a mission statement as it was a marketing slogan. The internet’s reaction was immediate and ecstatic. The phrase “the duo we didn’t know we needed” trended for 48 hours. This venture taps into a powerful cultural current: the deep-seated desire to see established, often arrogant, institutions get their comeuppance.
For CBS, the situation has devolved into a full-blown public relations catastrophe. The narrative has shifted from a prudent business decision to a colossal strategic error. An unnamed network executive confessed to Variety that they had “underestimated the loyalty of Colbert’s audience—and the cultural currency of Jasmine Crockett.” Now, the network faces the humiliating prospect of watching its former star launch a competing, and potentially more successful, show on a major streaming service. Reports indicate a fierce bidding war is underway between Netflix, Apple TV+, and Amazon Prime Video, with a deal rumored to be worth far more than the $40 million CBS was trying to save.
The success of this Unfiltered late-night experiment is far from guaranteed. It’s a high-stakes gamble. Can a show so deeply enmeshed in partisan politics find a broad audience in a country exhausted by division? Colbert’s satire, while beloved by his fans, has long been criticized by some as alienating. Crockett’s unapologetic style, while effective in a hearing room, could prove grating in a nightly format. There is a real danger that Unfiltered could become an echo chamber, preaching to a choir that is already converted.
Yet, that might be precisely the point. The show isn’t trying to be Johnny Carson, a unifying voice for a bygone American consensus. It’s a direct response to a fractured media landscape. Colbert and Crockett are betting that in an age of niche audiences and tailored algorithms, a show that unapologetically serves a passionate, engaged community can be more valuable—and more profitable—than one that tries to be everything to everyone. The very premise of the show challenges the old models and points toward a new future of television, where talent holds the power, and the audience, not the network, is the ultimate arbiter of success.
As the rumored October 1, 2025 premiere approaches, the industry is holding its breath. Unfiltered with Colbert & Crockett is more than just a new show. It is a test case. It is a challenge to the idea that provocative voices must be sanded down for corporate approval. It is a potential blueprint for a new media model, built on direct-to-audience platforms and the power of authentic, unfiltered personalities. Colbert and Crockett are not just building a stage for themselves; they are building a battering ram aimed squarely at the gates of the old guard. And from the looks of it, those gates are already beginning to splinter.
