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      in Television

      Why Is Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ Getting Canceled?

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      Maybe the “Late Show” decision is purely financial. But after Paramount’s cave over “60 Minutes,” it is hard to trust.In 2005, on his satire “The Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert coined the term “truthiness,” meaning a statement that was not actually true but represented a reality that the speaker wished to inhabit.In 2015, Colbert replaced David Letterman on CBS’s “Late Show,” which under him became one of the biggest and most prolific launchers of satirically guided missiles during the Trump era. In 2024, President Trump — who has repeatedly bemoaned his late-night coverage — said CBS “should terminate his contract.”Now, in 2025, CBS has said that it is canceling Colbert’s show at the end of its season, next May. Executives stressed, in the announcement, that the cut was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”Is that the truth, or merely truthy?There is good reason that CBS would need to offer that assurance. The network’s parent company, Paramount, just this month settled a lawsuit from President Trump, over the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris, for $16 million. At the same time, Paramount was hoping to close a multibillion-dollar merger with the company Skydance, which required the approval of the Trump administration.Many legal experts said the deal was an unnecessary concession in a frivolous case. At minimum it undermined one of TV journalism’s most accomplished independent voices. Some people called it “a big, fat bribe” — actually, those were Colbert’s words, in a blistering monologue a few days ago, which also mentioned speculation that CBS’s future owners might try to rein him in.Talk show hosts have bitten the hand that signs the contracts before; Letterman needled NBC and its then-parent, General Electric. But back then, the issues did not involve conflicts with a president willing to pull any necessary levers to punish and influence media outlets.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Alan Bergman, Half of a Prolific Lyric-Writing Team, Dies at 99

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      With his wife, Marilyn, he wrote the words to memorable TV theme songs and the Oscar-winning “The Way We Were” and “The Windmills of Your Mind.”Alan Bergman, who teamed with his wife, Marilyn, to write lyrics for the Academy Award-winning songs “The Way We Were” and “The Windmills of Your Mind” and for some of television’s most memorable theme songs, died on Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He was 99.His death was announced by a family spokesman, Ken Sunshine.The Bergmans regularly collaborated with prominent composers like Marvin Hamlisch, with whom they wrote “The Way We Were,” from the 1973 Barbra Streisand-Robert Redford romance of the same name (“Memories/Light the corners of my mind/Misty watercolor memories/Of the way we were”), and Michel Legrand, with whom they wrote “The Windmills of Your Mind,” from the 1968 crime movie “The Thomas Crown Affair,” starring Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway (“Round like a circle in a spiral, like a wheel within a wheel/Never ending or beginning on an ever spinning reel”).Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford in the 1973 film “The Way We Were.” The Bergmans won an Academy Award for the title song, a collaboration with Marvin Hamlisch.Columbia PicturesThey also wrote the lyrics to Mr. Legrand’s score for Ms. Streisand’s 1983 film “Yentl,” for which they won their third Academy Award.The Bergmans were among the favored lyricists of stars like Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett and especially Ms. Streisand, who in 2011 released the album “What Matters Most: Barbra Streisand Sings the Lyrics of Alan and Marilyn Bergman.” The album’s 10 tracks included “The Windmills of Your Mind,” “Nice ’n’ Easy,” “That Face” and the title song, none of which were among the numerous Bergman lyrics Ms. Streisand had recorded before. Promoting the album, she described the Bergmans as having “a remarkable gift for expressing affairs of the heart.”Between 1970 and 1996, the Bergmans received a total of 16 Oscar nominations. One year, 1983, they claimed three of the five best-song nominations, for “It Might Be You” from “Tootsie,” “If We Were in Love” from “Yes, Giorgio” and “How Do You Keep the Music Playing?” from “Best Friends.” (They lost to “Up Where We Belong” from “An Officer and a Gentleman.”)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      James Gunn Didn’t Want to Make ‘Superman.’ What Changed His Mind?

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      His hit reboot is meant to kick off years of new projects from the rebranded DC Studios. But for a long time, Gunn couldn’t figure out the character.“Today I have my wits about me,” James Gunn said. “I was going to die yesterday, I was so tired.”It was two weeks before the release of “Superman,” and I had met Gunn at the film’s Los Angeles press junket, just one stop on the director’s whirlwind, worldwide media tour. At the time, he was hopeful that the movie would connect with audiences, and it certainly has: “Superman” opened last weekend with $125 million at the domestic box office and earned an A- CinemaScore from audiences.Still, that success barely affords Gunn the opportunity to sleep any easier. “Because this is our first DC movie and I’m also the head of the studio,” he said, “I haven’t had a day off work for months.”Best known for directing Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies, Gunn was initially lured to DC Studios in 2018, when Marvel fired the filmmaker over resurfaced tweets. Though he was eventually rehired to finish the “Guardians” trilogy, his work on DC projects like “The Suicide Squad” and “Peacemaker” impressed the Warner Bros. Discovery chief executive David Zaslav, who tapped Gunn to run DC Studios alongside the producer Peter Safran.James Gunn with David Corenswet on the “Superman” set.Jessica Miglio/Warner Bros. “I’ve always had this desire to create a fictional universe,” said Gunn, 58. “I got hints of that with ‘Guardians’ and the cosmic universe of Marvel, but since I took on DC I knew that I was just going to have to go crazy for the first few years.” That commitment meant juggling many major projects simultaneously: At one point, Gunn was filming both “Superman” (with David Corenswet in the title role) and the second season of “Peacemaker” (starring John Cena and Gunn’s wife, Jennifer Holland) while also overseeing forthcoming DC projects like the film “Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow,” out next year from the director Craig Gillespie.“I also had to resign myself to the fact that I can’t do everything,” he said. “I give notes on all these other projects, but I can’t micromanage” them all, even though, he added, “I always want to do more. That’s been difficult, finding at least some boundaries.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      ‘Washington Black’ Is a Defiantly Joyful Fable

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      Adapted from the Esi Edugyan novel, this Hulu series follows a child who escapes slavery and embarks on a life of swashbuckling adventure.As the opening scenes of “Washington Black” come into view, the narrator Sterling K. Brown tells viewers that what’s about to unfold is “the story of a boy brave enough to change the world.”In the sweeping 19th-century adventure that follows, the wide-eyed, kindhearted George Washington Black, a.k.a. Wash, escapes the Barbados sugar plantation where he has been enslaved since birth, finds freedom and romance in Canada and uses his keen intellect to make marvelous scientific breakthroughs.The eight-part series, based on Esi Edugyan’s acclaimed 2018 novel of the same name, debuts Wednesday on Hulu.As the saga bounces back and forth in time, Wash (played by Eddie Karanja) as a boy and by Ernest Kingsley Jr. as a young man) hones his prodigious artistic talents with help from Christopher Wilde (Tom Ellis), a white scientist who facilitates the boy’s escape from bondage. Wash learns crucial lessons about the world — and his socially precarious place in it — as he soars through the air in a fantastical flying machine, sails the Caribbean Sea with pirates, rides a dog sled through the Arctic tundra and dodges a relentless bounty hunter hired by his former enslaver.Brown’s production company, Indian Meadows Productions, secured the rights to the novel in 2019 and the show’s creator, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, set about transforming the transcontinental coming-of-age tale for the screen.Tom Ellis plays a scientist who facilitates the boy’s escape from bondage.Lilja Jonsdottir/DisneyWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      ‘Shari & Lamb Chop’: A Singular Talent Gets Her Due

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      Shari Lewis’s pioneering role in children’s television becomes clear in a new film that can be perfunctory about her life.I was a PBS-watching child, and one of the shows I loved was “Lamb Chop’s Play-Along,” with a theme song I could still sing for you today and an infinitely earwormy outro, “The Song That Doesn’t End.” (Sorry.) I was a little old for the show when it started airing in 1992 — I watched with my brother, who would have been a toddler around then — but no matter. The mechanics of the puppetry and ventriloquism were entrancing, and they all revolved around a curly-haired woman named Shari Lewis and her puppet friends, especially the lightly sardonic and always funny Lamb Chop.My mother told me she used to watch Shari and Lamb Chop on TV, too. But it wasn’t till I was older that I realized what a trailblazer Lewis, who died in 1998, had been over her long career. She’s the subject of Lisa D’Apolito’s light and nostalgic new documentary, “Shari & Lamb Chop” (in theaters), which is full of archival footage stretching from Lewis’s early days on “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts,” the CBS variety show that provided her big break, through the children’s shows she hosted single-handedly (so to speak) with her puppets from the mid-1950s to 1960s, including “Facts N’ Fun,” “Shariland” and “The Shari Lewis Show.”The film explores her work in the years after “The Shari Lewis Show” was canceled, including nightclub acts, variety shows, telethons, county fairs and guest turns on various TV shows. And it chronicles her triumphant return to TV in the 1990s with “Lamb Chop’s Play-Along,” as well as her emergence as an advocate for children’s educational television.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Stephen Colbert Laments the End of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS

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      CBS “will be ending ‘The Late Show’ in May,” Colbert told his audience on Thursday. He kept the announcement brief and light.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.End of an EraAt the top of Thursday’s “Late Night,” Stephen Colbert announced that CBS will bring the show to an end in May.The network says the cancellation was “purely a financial decision,” but there’s speculation that Colbert’s recent criticism of CBS’s parent company, Paramount, was a factor. Colbert kept the announcement brief and light. When the audience booed the news, he responded with a smile, “Yeah, I share your feelings. It’s not just the end of our show, but it’s the end of ‘The Late Show’ on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.”“I do want to say that the folks at CBS have been great partners. I’m so grateful to the Tiffany network for giving me this chair and this beautiful theater to call home. And of course I’m grateful to you, the audience, who have joined us every night in here, out there, all around the world, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. I’m grateful to share the stage with this band, these artists over here every night. And I am extraordinarily, deeply grateful to the 200 people who work here.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“We get to do this show — we get to do this show for each other every day, all day, and I’ve had the pleasure and the responsibility of sharing what we do every day with you in front of this camera for the last 10 years. And let me tell you, it is a fantastic job. I wish somebody else was getting it. And it’s a job that I’m looking forward to doing with this usual gang of idiots for another 10 months. It’s going to be fun. Y’all ready?” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Epstein Edition)“Well, guys, President Trump’s handling of the Epstein files continues to dominate the news. Yeah, I wonder if we’re ever going to see the Epstein files. At this point, our best chance is if Coldplay shows them on the Jumbotron.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, the Epstein files won’t go away. Trump is so stressed, he’s like, ‘I need a vacation. What was the name of that fun island I used to go to?’” — JIMMY FALLON“President Trump said yesterday that he would rather talk about the success of his administration than the Jeffrey Epstein files. Yeah, I’m sure you would. That’s like Diddy saying he’d rather talk about his V.M.A.s — you don’t get to pick.” — SETH MEYERSWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Fans React to Colbert ‘Late Show’ Cancellation With Puzzlement and Anger

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      Many questioned the timing of and motivation for the announcement, noting that Mr. Colbert hosted the most-watched show in late night television.The first people to hear that CBS was canceling “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” reacted to the news loudly, and viscerally, with a chorus of “No!” that turned into a sustained round of boos.They were sitting in the audience in the Ed Sullivan Theater in Midtown Manhattan when an emotional Mr. Colbert announced the decision at the conclusion of the taping of his Thursday night show.Among those who were watching was Claire DeSantis, 29, who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. After the show concluded, she said, Mr. Colbert told the audience there would be an alternate taping of the cold open.“I thought it was going to be a fun surprise,” she said.Instead, Mr. Colbert stumbled a few times on the opening line — “Oh hey, everybody!” — before delivering the announcement about the cancellation in a single take. Ms. DeSantis, who does not regularly watch the show and wanted to go for the experience, said she cried, but not everyone in the audience was in tears as they left the theater. She called her mother and roommate to tell them what had happened.“I thought this was a legacy show,” Ms. DeSantis said. “I was just really surprised that it’s just going away completely.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      ‘Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ Is Being Canceled by CBS

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      The show will end in May, the network said, calling it “a purely financial decision.”In a decision that shocked the entertainment industry and comedy world, CBS said on Thursday that it was canceling the most-watched show in late night, “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” and ending a franchise that has existed for more than three decades.Mr. Colbert’s run — and “The Late Show” itself — will end in May after his contract expires.CBS executives said in a statement that the cancellation was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.”“It is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount,” said the executives, who included George Cheeks, the president of CBS and a co-chief executive of Paramount, CBS’s parent. “Our admiration, affection and respect for the talents of Stephen Colbert and his incredible team made this agonizing decision even more difficult.”Paramount is in the midst of closing a multibillion-dollar merger with the movie studio Skydance, a deal that requires approval from the Trump administration. Paramount recently agreed to pay President Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit over an interview on “60 Minutes,” a move Mr. Colbert criticized on his show as “a big fat bribe.” The merger still requires the approval of the Federal Communications Commission.Mr. Colbert said during the taping of “The Late Show” on Thursday that he was informed of the decision on Wednesday night. When his studio audience unleashed a chorus of boos upon hearing the news, Mr. Colbert said, “Yeah, I share your feelings.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More