Stephen Colbert is heading into the final week of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert Jon Stewart; Steven Spielberg; David Byrne with a run of guests that reads like a farewell card from late night itself. Jon Stewart, Steven Spielberg and David Byrne are set for May 19, with Bruce Springsteen booked for May 20, before the show’s final episode on May 21, 2025.
Colbert told viewers last year that the show was not being replaced and was simply going away. “I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away,” he said, as CBS prepared to end the franchise after more than 30 years on the network.
The last week matters because the show is closing at a moment when it remains the most-watched late-night program on television, averaging 2.7 million viewers, and because this is not an ordinary ending. In 2025, the show won its first Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Talk Series, a late honor for a program that debuted on CBS in August 1993 with David Letterman behind the desk and was taken over by Colbert in September 2015.
CBS announced last July that it was canceling the franchise and said the move was purely financial, not related to performance, content or anything else happening at Paramount. That explanation has not quieted the blowback. Colbert had called Paramount’s $16 million settlement over President Trump’s claims a “big fat bribe,” and at the time the company was seeking FCC approval for an $8 billion merger with Skydance Media. The FCC approved the deal a few weeks later.
Letterman, who built the show’s modern identity and still clearly takes the ending personally, said he has every right to be upset. He called the cancellation “a botched holdup,” said “They’re lying,” and added that they are “lying weasels.” He also said, “You folks wouldn’t be at this theater if it weren’t for me, and Stephen wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for me,” before concluding, “you can take a man’s show, you can’t take a man’s voice.”
Stewart, Colbert’s longtime friend and former boss at The Daily Show, has also been openly critical of Paramount since the announcement, saying the company capitulated to Trump. By the time Springsteen takes his turn on May 20 and the curtain falls two days later, the finale will have become about more than a television schedule. It will be the closing chapter of a franchise that helped define CBS late night for three decades, and the unresolved question is not whether the show mattered, but whether the network’s explanation for ending it will ever be believed.
