Stephen Colbert and CBS are officially saying goodbye to Late Show this month, with mere days left until the May 21 finale. The network says the show will go out without any competition from Colbert's peers, closing a three-decade-old run that helped define broadcast late night.
CBS has already set the next chapter for the 11:35 pm weeknight slot: Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen will take over after Late Show concludes, and CBS has granted the program the 2026-2027 season in that time slot. The handoff turns a one-time farewell into a hard business reset, and it arrives just as viewers are being asked to accept that one of television's most durable fixtures is ending for good.
Jason Lynch, a media analyst, said the mood around the shutdown is bigger than one host or one network. “It does feel like the end of an era,” he said, adding that for decades it seemed unfathomable that late night as it has been known would ever disappear. “Now, it’s fair to speculate if the current group of late-night hosts will be the very last people to ever have those jobs.”
The timing matters because the farewell comes after Colbert announced the cancellation in July 2025, setting in motion months of speculation about what, exactly, ended the show. CBS and parent company Paramount have called the decision purely financial, but commentators have questioned whether Colbert's criticism of his bosses and the Paramount merger with Skydance played any role in the outcome. Colbert has not hidden his own view of the business. In an interview with, he said, “It's possible that two things can be true,” and warned that broadcast can be in trouble because it cannot monetize as easily against YouTube and streaming competition. He also said, “But less than two years before they called to say it's over, they were very eager for me to be signed for a long time. So, something changed.”
Claire Ransom said the CBS move “works well for CBS if the goal is immediate cost control and predictable revenue,” which is the blunt logic behind the switch. But it also underlines the tension that has followed Colbert's exit from the start: the network is presenting the end of Late Show as a financial necessity, while the farewell itself has become a referendum on whether late-night television can still justify its place in a media market dominated by streaming and short-form video.
The answer to the question viewers have been asking is now clear: Stephen Colbert's last show is May 21, and CBS will replace it in the 11:35 pm slot with Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen in the 2026-2027 season.
