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Networks can’t seem to keep younger folks watching late-night TV—or making it, apparently, as CBS announced today that it’s ending co*edy game show After Midnight after host Taylor Tomlinson announced her intention to return to doing stand-up co*edy full-time. Tomlinson had been hosting the series (a reboot of co*edy Central’s @midnight) for two seasons, but made it clear in recent statements that the series would never be her “first love.” Stephen Colbert, who served as both an executive producer, and the lead-in, for After Midnight, gave a statement today noting that, “While we were excited and grateful for our third season to start in the fall, we respect Taylor’s decision to return to stand-up full time.”

Tomlinson’s decision to get back to doing what she loves marks an increasing trend in late-night (and especially late-late night), where high-profile young creators seem increasingly disinterested in devoting themselves, body, soul, and schedule, to creating daily TV that will then just get cut up into YouTube chunks for daytime viewers anyway. (See also Lilly Singh’s decision to vacate an even later timeslot than Tomlinson’s with A Little Late over at NBC back in 2021, to say nothing of the difficulties co*edy Central has had in filling the Daily Show’s anchor chair after Trevor Noah bailed on it back in 2022.) In the past, holding down 12:30 a.m. was generally seen as a long-form audition to one day take over the plum 11:30 p.m. slot, but there are a ton of factors that make that a non-issue in 2025. (All three current network late-night hosts are young enough that they could be doing this for another twenty years; NBC screwed Conan O’Brien on this basic arrangement so dramatically that nobody trusts it anymore; it’s not clear how many modern co*ics even view The Tonight Show as some sort of fabled crown jewel at this point. Honestly, take your pick of motives for indifference.)

The upshot of all this is that CBS now finds itself with a gap in its late-night schedule—one it seems inclined to just sort of give up on. The network will (per Variety) just be ceding the 12:30 a.m. spot back to local channels, rather than spend money trying to find a replacement for Tomlinson and her show.