Why Paramount kept "South Park," but not "The Late Show"
For Paramount CEO David Ellison, South Park proved its value as evergreen comedy in a way that Stephen Colbert's Late Show did not.
Over the past two days, Paramount has launched a media charm offensive. Executives held invite-only briefings with trade outlets and granted candid one-on-one interviews, including with new CEO David Ellison. The goal was simple: repair goodwill with the press after a bruising merger process with Skydance.
The merger process drew heavy criticism over the concessions Paramount and Skydance made to secure government approval. Among them: settling a lawsuit brought by President Trump over a “60 Minutes” interview he disliked, agreeing to install an ombudsman at CBS News who will reportedly report directly to Trump, and offering conservative groups free commercial inventory for public service announcements. These moves fueled suspicion that politics influenced corporate decisions.
Many believe that a decision by CBS to end “The Late Show” next year was one of those things that Paramount and Skydance offered to the Trump administration in order to seal the deal. Paramount disputes this. So does Skydance. The decision was purely financial, CBS said. Skydance was not involved in that part of the process, a corporate attorney told lawmakers.
That explanation landed poorly with progressive lawmakers, Trump critics and some media analysts, even as reports indicated CBS was losing about $40 million a year on the program. They argue the show was targeted because host Stephen Colbert often uses Trump as a punchline to his jokes and is open about his disdain for the president.
That belief was reiterated among some conspirators after Paramount announced a new five-year deal that brings the animated sitcom “South Park” to its streaming platform on an exclusive basis. Reports indicate the deal involves Paramount shelling out $300 million every year for exclusive, worldwide digital rights to the show. (It is separate from Paramount’s agreement to broadcast the show on Comedy Central, which ends in 2027 but is likely to be renewed.)
Since the deal, “South Park” has aired two episodes that were, in themselves, highly critical of Trump and his administration — the first episode ended with a close-up of Trump’s genitalia (which was actually the index finger of one of the show’s co-creators) and the second spoofed Vice President J.D. Vance and Homeland Security Director Kristi Noem. Many saw this as South Park’s showrunners thumbing their nose at Paramount after securing a major payday, one that the company largely can’t avoid. Others questioned how Paramount could afford to write a big check for South Park but couldn’t find a few dollars to keep the Late Show on the air.
This week, Ellison shed some light on that answer.
In an interview with CNN, Ellison described South Park as a “very funny” show that was also immensely profitable to Paramount, without getting into too many specifics. He downplayed the show’s decision to target Trump and his administration in the first two post-deal episodes, saying the tone was simply part of South Park’s DNA.
“Matt and Trey are incredibly talented,” Ellison said, referring to the show’s two creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. “They are equal opportunity offenders, and always have been.”
Paramount itself is not off-limits. The first episode since the new deal was signed alluded to the company’s settlements and the cancellation of the Late Show during a monologue delivered by none other than Jesus Christ himself (who, in the South Park universe, had his own public access television show for a bit — so, he knows a thing or two about the TV industry).
But that was easy for Paramount to see past, because the show’s current and back catalog pays dividends in a way that its flagship late night talk show currently does not. People will sit down and watch one South Park episode after another — whether that’s by tuning into “Comedy Central,” where it seems to be on all the time, or by streaming its on-demand catalog on HBO Max and, now, Paramount Plus.
Early episodes of South Park were not particularly topical — in the pilot episode, one of the flagship characters is abducted by aliens; in another, two physically-disabled children fight in front of a grocery store. But that doesn’t mean South Park did not shy away from current events — in the episode “Cripple Fight,” a subplot involves a gay man being expelled from the Boy Scouts. (The episode aired one year after a key Supreme Court decision on the matter, which affirmed the Scouts’ ability to block gay adults from joining its ranks.)
In recent years, South Park has taken more of its cues from social issues and political news — but the quality of its episodes and the freshness of its storylines have withstood the test of time. In 2019, an episode called “Basic Cable” involved an ancillary character struggling to convince his father to buy a new streaming service so he could watch a popular show and win over the affection of a female classmate. The show highlighted the ongoing fragmentation of the TV landscape across broadcast, cable and streaming — which still feels very relevant today, and probably will for years to come.
Even if some of the show’s storylines are dated, the show’s characters and their antics are funny. There is something pleasurable about knowing that, in those earlier seasons, a hooded character named Kenny was going to die. (That doesn’t happen anymore — Parker and Stone had enough intuition to know when the motif had run its course. Kenny no longer dies.) The Pokémon craze may have died in the early 2000s, but the third season episode “Chinpokomon” is still enjoyable. (It also won an Emmy.)
Late night is a different beast. The first shows that aired in the 1950s and 1960s were intended to fill time after local network affiliates ended their newscasts. “The Tonight Show” on NBC became a money-making institution during Johnny Carson’s run as host, owed in large part to the fact that he and his team worked hard to appeal to the heartland of America as much as he did to those who lived on the coasts.
Colbert took over the Late Show on CBS from David Letterman, who positioned himself as the eccentric opposite of Carson, while borrowing the best ideas that made the Tonight Show work. Like Carson, Letterman’s punchlines cast a wide net, and his sketches like “Stupid Pet Tricks” and “How Many Spider-Mans Can Fit in a Jamba Juice?” were apolitical commentary that drew laughs from red states as much as blue ones.
Letterman hand-picked Colbert to serve as his replacement in 2014, and Colbert’s version of the Late Show debuted the following year. Colbert’s first few episodes broke the mold — he didn’t deliver a traditional, stand-up monologue; instead, he told a few jokes from the stage, then moved over to his desk, where he riffed on the headlines similarly as his character on “The Colbert Report.”
Except Stephen Colbert, the talk show host, was not the same as Stephen Colbert, the Comedy Central character that spoofed conservative cable news commentators on “The Colbert Report” for years. Americans didn’t know how to respond to a different late night format, and they didn’t warm up to Colbert’s authentic self at first, either.
CBS eventually hired Chris Licht to turn things around. As executive producer, Licht restored the Late Show’s original format — monologue and all — and pushed Colbert to lean harder into political comedy. From a ratings perspective, that strategy worked, with the show climbing to the top spot in the broadcast late night ratings, a position it still holds today.
But topical political comedy is not usually evergreen, and that matters in an era where media companies are increasingly focused on the long-term value of their intellectual property. While clips from the Late Show do perform well on YouTube — and Paramount earns money from those clips — it only takes a few weeks before Colbert’s jokes start to feel stale. If your whole shtick is making fun of controversies as they play out in real-time, you fall victim to the effects of the public’s short attention span.
Put another way, no one is re-watching Colbert’s monologues from five years ago on YouTube — and, even if they are, it’s usually not because they’re wanting to be entertained. Given the short shelf life of Colbert’s comedy, it isn’t readily apparent how Paramount is supposed to capitalize on Colbert telling Trump to “go fuck yourself” five years from now, even if it does pull in ratings and generate chatter today. South Park is different — people watch old episodes over and over again because the characters are amusing, the story lines are solid and the jokes still land.
The loudest critics of Paramount’s decision to cancel the Late Show are people who like Colbert and despise Trump. They feel Colbert was done dirty because he was critical of Paramount’s settlement with Trump — he called it a “big fat bribe” — and his nightly insistence on using the president’s apparent lack of intelligence and political acumen to draw cheap laughs.
If Paramount was cleaning house of anything that did or might upset Trump, South Park would have been next on the chopping block. But the precise opposite happened — the company continued airing South Park and signed that $300 million deal with Parker and Stone while waiting for approval from the FCC to merge with Skydance. The first episode after that deal — where South Park made fun of Trump’s penis — aired the day before the FCC approved the merger.
Paramount’s comedy strategy is anchored in financial reality, not political appeasement. “South Park” has delivered long-term value for more than two decades. “The Late Show” under Colbert did not create the same durable material — its monologues and desk segments cannot be repackaged into a 24-hour free streaming channel (as Letterman and Conan O’Brien have done through a partnership with Samsung), and its clips lose heat quickly.
Paramount believes it should not subsidize a product with little long-term return. That may be bad for the art of late night comedy, but it is also business.
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