Stephen Colbert’s 11-year run as host of The Late Show will end on May 21, and he marked his final weeks on Thursday night with a guest who knew the room better than almost anyone: David Letterman.
Letterman turned the appearance into a broadside against Cbs, saying backstage that “a guy comes over, he says he’s from CBS and he fires me. What is going on over there?!” He added, “I have every right to be pissed off, so I’ll be pissed off here a little bit,” then told Colbert, “you can take a man’s show, you can’t take a man’s voice.”
The moment landed because the ending of Colbert’s show has already become bigger than a late-night programming change. Cbs said the program was losing around $40 million a year. Jimmy Kimmel pushed back hard on that figure, saying, “Not a snowball’s chance in hell that’s accurate.” Donald Trump, meanwhile, celebrated Colbert’s departure on Truth Social and suggested Kimmel was next, posting: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next. Has even less talent than Colbert!”
The announcement came weeks before the Trump-loyalist Ellison family finalized its CBS-Paramount takeover, which fed the suspicion among many viewers and performers that the timing was meant to please Trump. That suspicion hung over Thursday’s broadcast, even as the show leaned into spectacle. Letterman and Colbert went up to the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan, where stagehands, after being greased by Letterman, tossed couches off the roof and onto a giant CBS logo. A desk chair followed, then watermelons and a wedding cake.
That over-the-top destruction was not random. Colbert had previously rebuilt the theater after taking over from Letterman, and Letterman made that history part of the joke and the grievance. “This theater, you folks wouldn’t be in this theater if it weren’t for me, and Stephen wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me, and we rebuilt this theater, and then Stephen came in, and look at this? It’s like the Bellagio. But, listen… as we all understand, you can take a man’s show, you can’t take a man’s voice,” he said.
He also asked Colbert if Skydance owned the furniture onstage, and Colbert answered that Cbs owned it. Later, Letterman said the line that sounded most like a warning wrapped in a farewell: “What I’m really worried about is: What will become of the Jimmys? Are they going to be alright?”
That is the story now. Colbert is not just signing off after 11 years; he is leaving behind a show that became a proxy fight over money, ownership and politics, with Trump cheering from one side and late-night peers treating the cancellation as a test of how far a network can go before the audience reads a motive into it. The last scheduled show is May 21, but the real ending has already started: Colbert’s exit has turned into a public argument about who gets to decide what survives on television, and why.
