• Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed takes over Stephen Colbert’s 11:35 p.m. CBS time slot starting Friday, May 22
• Allen is paying CBS for the time slot and handling all ad sales himself, saving the network an estimated $150–$170 million annually
• He specifically chose May 22 to honor his hero Johnny Carson, whose final Tonight Show aired exactly 34 years earlier
• Allen promises zero politics — \”You come, you laugh\” — in a deliberate departure from Colbert’s format
• The deal is part of a sweeping media expansion that also includes a controlling stake in BuzzFeed and ambitions to acquire Starz

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When CBS announced it was canceling The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, Byron Allen didn’t mourn. He picked up the phone.

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\”I said, ‘OK, do you like money?’\” Allen recalled this week. \”They said, ‘Yes!’\”

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Starting Friday, May 22, Allen’s long-running syndicated comedy series Comics Unleashed takes over the 11:35 p.m. ET slot on CBS — one of the most storied windows in American television — with back-to-back half-hour episodes. That’s followed by two more half-hours of his comedy game show Funny You Should Ask, hosted by Jon Kelley, running through 1:37 a.m. Both shows will also be available to Paramount+ Premium subscribers through their local CBS affiliate feed.

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Colbert’s final episode airs Thursday, May 21. By Friday night, the era is over — and Allen’s begins.

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The Deal That Saved CBS $150 Million

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The math behind this arrangement is striking. Under the deal, Allen leases the two-hour block from CBS and sells all the advertising inventory himself. He wouldn’t disclose exactly what he’s paying the network, but he was direct about what CBS is getting out of it: relief from a massive financial burden.

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\”Between the two time periods, they’re saving approximately $150 million-plus per year, just on production and marketing,\” Allen explained. \”And that does not include what I’m paying for the time slot. So it’s a great deal for CBS.\”

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CBS had been spending roughly that amount producing both The Late Show and the show that followed it, Taylor Tomlinson’s After Midnight. When the network decided to cancel both, Allen’s pitch was essentially: don’t replace them with anything. Let me take it off your hands entirely.

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\”I said, ‘Save your money. I will put my show Comics Unleashed on,’\” he told CBS Mornings this week. \”They said, ‘This is a great idea, you’re going to save us $150 to $170 million.’\”

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He put it more colorfully in another interview: \”I am a gift from the money gods and the comedy gods.\”

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The context matters here. Broadcast networks are under serious financial strain — sports rights are expensive, and advertising dollars are migrating fast from linear TV to digital. Allen knows this firsthand. Through Allen Media Group, he has invested roughly a billion dollars acquiring ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox affiliates across 11 U.S. markets, plus the Weather Channel and other properties. He’s watched the economics shift in real time. CBS’s late-night costs had become, in his view, an unnecessary burden in a landscape that no longer justified them.

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\”No Politics. You Come, You Laugh.\”

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The tonal shift from Colbert to Allen is going to be significant — and Allen is leaning into it.

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When CBS Mornings co-host Adriana Diaz asked him directly whether Comics Unleashed would get political, Allen didn’t hesitate: \”No, no, no, no politics. That’s it. You come, you laugh.\”

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He added: \”I want to bring people together using comedy. I’m going to appeal to all.\” The show, he said, has featured more than a thousand comedians across twenty years — \”every shape and size, you name it\” — and the format stays squarely focused on funny. \”We’re doing a show with nothing political, racist, sexist or homophobic… just clean comedy,\” he told Variety.

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That’s a pointed contrast to Colbert’s Late Show, which became one of late-night’s most politically charged programs. The show’s cancellation came just days after Colbert publicly criticized CBS parent company Paramount for its $16 million settlement with President Donald Trump — a decision that landed while Paramount was in the middle of a merger with Skydance Media requiring Trump administration approval. CBS called the cancellation \”purely a financial decision,\” but the timing drew intense scrutiny, and figures like David Letterman and Jimmy Kimmel were vocal in their criticism of the network.

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Allen has been careful to thread the needle. He and Colbert are friends, and he made that clear. \”I think it was a very unfortunate event,\” he said on CBS Mornings. \”I love Stephen Colbert. I’m a big fan. Once they made the decision, I said, ‘OK, this isn’t show business, this is business show.’ I absolutely love Colbert, and I would do anything — he doesn’t need me — but I would do anything to support him.\”

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In a separate interview, he went further: \”I really like Stephen Colbert. I think he is a magnificent human being. He’s a super talent. I believe he is an American treasure.\”

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Even Letterman, who was critical of CBS’s decision, offered something close to a grudging endorsement of Allen’s format. On The Barbara Gaines Show in April, he said: \”The show is a pretty good idea. It’s all panel. Nobody’s doing any stand-up except they’re seated doing stand-up.\”

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The Night He Watched Johnny Carson and Decided Everything

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Here’s what makes Allen’s May 22 launch date more than just a scheduling choice.

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CBS had originally wanted him to premiere on September 21. Allen said no. He pushed for May 22 specifically because it marks the 34th anniversary of Johnny Carson’s final night hosting The Tonight Show — May 22, 1992.

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\”What people don’t realize is that was my hero Johnny Carson’s last night,\” Allen said. \”Normally, you would premiere in September, but I said, ‘No, no, no, no. That’s when Johnny stepped down. That’s when I’m stepping up.’\”

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That connection to Carson runs deep — and it starts in childhood. Allen’s mother, who had him when she was just 17, worked at NBC and couldn’t afford childcare. So she brought young Byron to the lot in Burbank, where he’d wait for her to finish her shift while watching Carson tape his show.

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\”I’ve said to myself, what a wonderful way to go through life, making people laugh,\” Allen recalled.

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In 1979, the circle started to close. Allen got to perform stand-up on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, becoming the youngest comedian ever to appear on the program. He was a teenager.

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\”I was thinking to myself, in the next five minutes I’m going to change my life and my mother’s life forever,\” he said. \”So I’m going to go out there and have a great time, and after I make these people laugh, we’re never going to worry about a bowl of cereal again.\”

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Now, nearly five decades later, he’s inherited the slot Carson helped define. He said he plans to open that first episode on Friday with a moment of acknowledgment: \”I will take a minute to share some thoughts about late night and what we’re doing.\”

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\”It makes me feel great, because at the end of the day, all I want to do is make my mama proud, no matter how rich I get,\” Allen said. \”I’m just still a little scared little boy hanging on to my mother’s leg.\”

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The Bigger Empire Allen Is Building

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The CBS deal is just one piece of a much larger expansion Allen is engineering right now.

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Last week, he acquired a 52% controlling stake in BuzzFeed — paying $20 million in cash upfront plus $100 million in a promissory note due in five years. When the deal closes, expected by the end of May, Allen becomes BuzzFeed’s chairman and CEO, with co-founder Jonah Peretti moving to a president of BuzzFeed AI role. BuzzFeed, once valued at $1.7 billion, had recently warned investors it had \”substantial doubt\” about its ability to continue as a going concern, posting a net loss of $57.3 million in 2025 on revenue of $185.3 million.

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Allen’s plan is to turn BuzzFeed and HuffPost into streaming brands, anchored by his Weather Channel-owned Local Now platform, which ingests roughly 500,000 pieces of video per day and provides hyper-localized news, weather, sports, and traffic content. He wants user-generated content, revenue-sharing with creators, and no paywalls.

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\”We are chasing YouTube,\” he said plainly. \”The two best words in media: ‘free’ and ‘streaming.’ Bring it together and, poof, you’ve got something magical.\”

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He was characteristically blunt about why the BuzzFeed deal made sense: \”It was definitely a distressed sale — without a doubt. They told the world they were about to run out of money! When a company is lying on its back, you can’t fall off the floor.\”

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Then there’s Starz. In March, Allen’s investment arm acquired a 10.7% stake in the premium cable network for $25 million — making him the second-largest stockholder. Starz responded almost immediately by adopting a “poison pill” shareholder rights plan, which allows existing investors to buy shares at a 50% discount if any single investor crosses 17.5% ownership — a move widely understood as a defense against Allen.

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He’s not deterred. \”The poison pill, that was a stupid move. They didn’t need to do that,\” he said. \”When I decide to buy them, I will do a lot more than what they’re doing now — I can make Starz infinitely bigger.\”

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Allen has a history of ambitious media bids that didn’t close — a $30 billion play for Paramount Global, a $3.5 billion offer for BET, a run at TV station operator Tegna, and a reported interest in the NFL’s Washington Commanders. But at 65, with a CBS time slot, a BuzzFeed acquisition, and a Starz stake on the books, he’s building something that looks increasingly like a real empire — one comedy block at a time.

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Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen premieres Friday, May 22, at 11:35 p.m. ET on CBS.

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