CBS

Paramount Global's merger with Skydance, led by David Ellison, closed in 2025 and reshaped CBS's corporate ownership for the first time in nearly two decades, arriving in the same stretch as 60 Minutes facing a lawsuit and settlement pressure from the Trump administration over an interview edit, and Stephen Colbert's Late Show getting cancelled amid questions about how much the timing was tied to merger approval politics rather than straightforward ratings economics. Through all of it, CBS's NFL package and its procedural bench — the NCIS and FBI franchises — kept the network's core schedule stable.

Our take: the 60 Minutes settlement and the Colbert cancellation landing in the same window as a politically sensitive merger approval is the real story here, more than any single programming decision — a network built its brand partly on hard-nosed journalism and institutional late-night comedy, and both took visible hits right as ownership had the most incentive to keep federal regulators happy.

Watch what Ellison's Skydance-era Paramount does with CBS News' editorial independence and whether a Colbert-style replacement in late night leans safer — those two signals will say more about the new ownership's priorities than any press release will.