CBS is ending its late-night staple and will put Byron Allen’s Comics Unleashed in the 11:35 p.m. ET slot starting Friday, a sharp change that gives the syndication veteran a bigger stage and gives the network a cheaper way to fill the hour.
Allen says he reached out after news broke in July that CBS would remove Stephen Colbert and the late-night program from the air. He told the network, “I’ll buy the time period, and you can save over $110 million,” framing the deal as a clean financial trade: Allen leases the hour and sells the advertising inventory himself.
The arrangement is the latest sign of how hard CBS is pushing to reshape late night. Comics Unleashed, a series Allen has long wanted in the spotlight, is moving into a slot once anchored by network comedy and reaching viewers at a time when broadcast television is under pressure to do more with less. Allen, who got to do stand-up comedy on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1979, said he had been thinking about late night since he was a child watching Carson while his mother worked at NBC.
That history matters because Allen is not just buying airtime; he is stepping into a space he has chased for decades. He founded Allen Media Group, also called Entertainment Studios, in 1993, and built it into a broader media company that bought the Weather Channel’s parent company in 2018. He also bought a controlling stake in BuzzFeed last week, and he said his plan includes user-generated content that will be available on his ad-supported streaming platform, Local Now.
Allen has described the CBS move in blunt, almost transactional terms, saying he approached the network with a sales pitch rather than a plea. He recalled asking, “OK, do you like money?” and saying he was “putting a lot of money in their cash register.” He also said, “I am a gift from the money gods and the comedy gods,” a line that fits the confidence he has shown while expanding across television and digital media.
He and Colbert are friends, and Allen said they go way back, which softens what might otherwise look like a hard takeover of a familiar slot. Still, the tension is obvious: CBS is replacing a removed late-night program with Allen’s syndicated series in the same time period, betting that the new setup can deliver the economics the old one no longer could. BuzzFeed, meanwhile, has struggled to maintain a sustainable business model, according to a recent account cited in the discussion, making Allen’s push there another test of whether his advertising-heavy approach can travel across platforms.
Allen’s larger argument is that he is building on what already works rather than tearing it down. He said, “Everything Jonah [Peretti] has built in the last 20 years, we are not touching that,” adding that the plan is additive. For CBS, the immediate answer to the late-night shakeup is money and flexibility. For Allen, the answer is reach. Starting Friday, he gets both.
