We still remember where we were when we received the startling news. We were in Buffalo, New York, where the news arrived that would jolt every CBS affiliate to its core. The announcement stood to change the fate of their late newscasts and impact the bottom line, in terms of both ratings and revenue.

Frankly, we were a little gobsmacked when we heard it.

It was August 1993, and the big announcement was that David Letterman was leaving NBC to come over to CBS and host weeknights at 11:35 p.m. After decades of being a non-contender in late night, then-CBS President Howard Stringer had pulled off the big deal that NBC should have made (but it had already placed its bet on Jay Leno) and Dave would be moving into what long-time CBS staff knew as Studio 50, but the world would come to know as “The Ed Sullivan Theater.” Allow us to take the opportunity to recommend one of the best books about the television business we’ve ever read. That would be Bill Carter’s “The Late Shift” from 2019. It details the backstage drama between Leno, Letterman, and the networks for the late-night audience. It is definitely worth the read if you are at all a student of the television business.

There was joy in the heart of everyone connected to the late newscasts at any CBS affiliate because now, folks would have a reason to watch those newscasts and stay up for Dave. In the same way that our parents watched the late news and stayed up for Johnny Carson on NBC for three decades, from 1962 to 1992.

Not to be too graphic about it, but many of you who were born during that period were probably conceived while Johnny was on the air. That was likely the real reason why your parents had a TV in the bedroom in the first place.

So when Letterman made the move from 30 Rock to Broadway in the summer of 1993, being at a CBS affiliate was to be filled with unbridled optimism about how your late news race could change.

And when Dave announced his retirement in 2015, there was concern that no one could really fill his shoes and keep CBS competitive in late night, which by then was a three-way race, as aside from NBC’s “The Tonight Show” there was also ABC’s up and coming offering with “Jimmy Kimmel Live” taking over the time period from “Nightline.”

CBS would turn to its corporate cousin at Comedy Central to draft its late night “conservative-satirist-in-chief” Stephen Colbert to take over the reins hosting “The Late Show.”

Fast forward a decade, and Stephen Colbert has just delivered the shocking announcement in the taping of his Thursday night broadcast that CBS will be cancelling “The Late Show” in May of next year. Ending the program’s 32-year run on the network and parting ways with its host.

Network executives, including CBS President George Cheeks, quickly put out a statement that stressed that it was “purely a financial decision–against a challenging backdrop in late night.”

Purely a financial decision? Perhaps like that recent $16 million payment to settle a lawsuit holding up CBS’s parent, Paramount Global, from closing its pending deal to merge with movie studio Skydance? The very same payment that was called out by Colbert on Monday night’s show, which was his first back from a two-week vacation–during which the settlement was finally announced. In his monologue, Colbert labeled it just as many people saw it: “A Big Fat Bribe.”

Thursday night’s statement from CBS tried to add some damage control to head off the obvious questions. “It (the decision) is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” To put a cherry on top of that denial, the statement added: “Out admiration, affection and respect for the talents of Stephen Colbert and his incredible team made this agonizing decision even more difficult.”

If you find yourself booing at that paper-thin praise, just as the live audience in The Ed Sullivan Theatre did during Thursday night’s taping when Colbert told them of the news, take some comfort at Colbert’s response to them when waited a beat and simply said, “Yeah, I share your feelings.”

Being a class act, Colbert went on to praise his network, saying that CBS executives “have been great partners.” Just over a month ago, those same “great partners” also pulled the plug on “After Midnight,” the show that followed Colbert at 12:35pm each weeknight. To be fair, that was more about host Taylor Tomlinson’s desire to focus more on her continued success as a touring stand-up comedian. But CBS took the opportunity not to keep the show and replace her with another host. Instead, it has said it will fill the timeslot this fall with would-be media mogul Byron Allen and his “Comics Unleashed” series, which was last funny in its first airings some two decades back.

We at TVND.com are not unaware of the seismic changes occurring in the television industry. Last month’s numbers, showing that streaming video has overtaken broadcast and cable as the leading way audiences watch video, were a sobering milestone. The New York Times, in covering the cancellation of Colbert, reported that the ad revenue from late-night network shows has dropped by 50% in the last seven years.

But even if we are to believe the economic reason CBS offers for ending “The Late Show”, the reality is that the timing of dropping a voice criticizing President Trump, even a comic one, won’t likely sit well with a significant number of people. That includes some Democratic lawmakers, who were already on social media questioning the real motives behind the decision, a decision that Colbert himself was told of just 24 hours before announcing it at the beginning of his program on Thursday night.

Of course, issuing feckless threats on social media seems to be about all Democratic politicians are capable of doing with any effectiveness these days.

And as bad as we feel for Colbert, our fellow native Charlestonian who may be joining the ever-growing ranks of the unemployed next year, we also sympathize with all those local news directors at CBS stations who just lost a still reasonably decent “lead-out” for their late news offerings. Sure, what airs after the late newscast might not draw as much of an audience as it once did. Plus, the ability to watch the nightly monologue and best interview moments on YouTube whenever one might want to has certainly eroded any sense that one might have to stay up just to know what happened on any late-night show and still be “in the loop” for the office watercooler the next morning.

Assuming that anyone has a watercooler in their office anymore, and that anyone ever talks around it.

Maybe this news is just another indication that these seismic changes affecting the industry are intensifying as an existential threat to broadcast television. Maybe it is something far more sinister. We’ll let history write the final word on this particular decision, which does feel, to us at least, like it is far more than “purely a financial decision.”

The way things are going, maybe another future financial decision will be to cut the late news back to being just 15 minutes long. Just as it was back in television’s early years. That was just before many stations would sign off for the evening. Then, the late news expanded to “a full half-hour of news, weather, and sports.” Then, some stations discovered that running old movies appealed to a good number of insomniacs in the audience.

What title did many stations give to the newly discovered timeslot at 11:30pm?  Ironically enough, it was “The Late Show.”

Update: Author Bill Carter wrote on X Thursday night: “My first impression abt the cancelation of Colbert: The financial side of that business has definitely been under pressure, as CBS release asserts, but if CBS believes it can escape without some serious questions about capitulating to Trump, they are seriously deluded.”