Right, those things are true, but they still don’t explain this decision.

“Right. It is true that Late Night is dying, that it is not making as much money as it used to, that the viewership is dropping. But I mean that doesn’t explain why they would cancel it.”

… what? That literally is the only reason to cancel a show unless there is some moral reasoning for it.

It was the #1 talk show for what, 8 years?

Which, like I said, doesn’t matter when all of Late Night is dying. All of it. In 2015, the Emmys split the Outstanding Variety Series into two. One of them was the Outstanding Talk Shows. In 2017, you had Nominations for Last Week Tonight, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Jimmy Kimmel Live, Late Show with Corden, Late Show with Colbert and Real Time with Bill Maher. If you go to last year? The Daily Show, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Colbert. This year? Daily Show, Kimmel, Colbert. The other shows are not getting nominations either because no one is watching it or because they’re cancelled. The entire award category is dying off and simply won’t exist 5 years from now.

No sane network would just cancel it. They would revamp, cut costs. Every business would extract the value from the brand before tossing its lifeless corpse off the boat.

They will if the entire format is dying which it is. Like… Colberts contract is due to renew next year. They’re not cancelling it. They’re just not renewing it.

The most plausible explanation for this show being canceled at this moment is to appease Trump.

No. It really isn’t. The most plausible explanation for this is that the Colbert show is following the exact same theme that every other Late Night show has had in the past few years. It is kind of a ridiculous conspiracy to jump to “Oh this is clearly because of Trump” from a single questionable moment when every other Late Night show has been cancelled or ended in the past 5 years. You have to actively reject facts to come to the conclusion that the Trump reason is “the most plausible.”