Byron Allen will take over one of television’s most coveted late-night time slots when Comics Unleashed airs at 11:35 p.m. ET Friday, after CBS announced it is ending The Late Show.
Allen, the founder of Allen Media Group, said he approached CBS after news broke in July that the Paramount-owned network would be removing Stephen Colbert from the late-night slot. He framed the deal as a straight business proposition — and a quick one: "OK, do you like money?" he asked the network, and recalled the response, "Yes!" Allen said. He told CBS, "I’ll buy the time period, and you can save over $110 million."
The arrangement is simple on paper and lucrative on Allen’s side. Under the lease, Allen buys the hour from CBS and sells the advertising inventory himself. He described the move as a business opportunity and promised he was "putting a lot of money in their cash register." Last week Allen expanded his media footprint further when he bought a controlling stake in BuzzFeed.
Those numbers — the 11:35 p.m. start time and the "over $110 million" CBS reportedly saves — are the weight of the story. Allen said the network chose to end The Late Show and not to replace it with another in-house program, a decision he summarized with the phrase "not put on another show." For Allen, the math is decisive: lease the hour, program it with Comics Unleashed and keep the ad revenue to recoup his investment.
Allen’s entry into the 11:35 p.m. hour is the latest move in a career built on buying and operating television real estate. He founded Allen Media Group, then called Entertainment Studios, in 1993. His holdings include niche channels such as Pets.TV and Cars.TV, and in 2018 Entertainment Studios bought the Weather Channel’s parent company. Allen traces his interest in late-night TV back to his childhood: he appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson in 1979 and has often cited those early experiences. He has said, "You know, my mom ended up convincing NBC to start an intern program with her, so she could work here for free," and that when he appeared on Carson he thought, "in the next five minutes I’m going to change my life and my mother’s life forever, 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."
Allen also addressed how BuzzFeed will fit into his strategy: "Everything Jonah [Peretti] has built in the last 20 years, we are not touching that," he said, adding, "That is the foundation we are building on that, and we’re making it additive." He said some user-generated content will be available on Local Now rather than behind a paywall — a signal that his late-night effort is part of a broader plan to funnel audience and ad inventory across platforms.
The tension in the deal is not between Allen and one network executive but between commerce and tradition. Allen is friends with Stephen Colbert and has said they "go way back," yet the business choice here is literal: CBS will end a storied late-night program and monetize the slot by leasing it to an outside operator. Allen called his arrival a mix of fate and calculation — "I am a gift from the money gods and the comedy gods" — but the pact also means a long-running network franchise makes way for a leased hour whose success will be counted in advertising dollars.
What happens next is clear and immediate. Comics Unleashed airs at 11:35 p.m. ET Friday under Allen’s control; he will sell the ads and run the books. The operational test is straightforward: can a leased late-night hour, programmed outside the network’s production system and tied to a newly acquired digital strategy, deliver viewers and revenue the way a traditional network-produced show once did? If Allen’s pitch to CBS — "I’ll buy the time period, and you can save over $110 million" — proves true, networks may increasingly view leased hours as an attractive shortcut to balance sheets. For viewers, Friday will be when they see whether that arithmetic produces television worth staying up for.
