Stephen Colbert is saying goodbye to The Late Show this week, and CBS will go dark on the 21 May after ending a 33-year television institution that began with David Letterman and later became Colbert’s nightly stage. The network said last July that the show would be cancelled, but the final stretch has played like something closer to a public reckoning than a routine farewell.
That is because the decision landed just three days after Colbert mocked a $16 million legal settlement between CBS’s parent company Paramount and Donald Trump, and just a week before Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance was approved by federal regulators. CBS said the cancellation was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night,” but the timing made that explanation hard for many viewers to accept. Letterman, who helped define the franchise after Johnny Carson retired from NBC in 1992 and CBS launched The Late Show in 1993, did not buy the corporate line. “They’re lying,” he said. “They’re lying weasels.”
Colbert, 62, took over the desk in 2015 after nine years playing a bombastic, rightwing blowhard on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report, and the end of his run has turned into a long goodbye at the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York. The tributes have ranged from the comic to the extravagant: Jimmy Fallon offered a parody lyric — “And now the end is near/ And so you face the final curtain/ But Trump, he made it clear/ He wants you gone/ Of that we’re certain” — while Hugh Jackman sang a take on Neil Diamond’s Sweet Caroline, Bette Midler rewrote Wind Beneath My Wings, John Lithgow wrote and recited a poem titled The Mighty Colbert, and Jake Tapper hand-delivered a painting of Colbert as Gollum from The Lord of the Rings.
The farewell matters because The Late Show was never just another late-night slot. It was a franchise that ran from Letterman to Colbert, shaped by two very different hosts and now ending under pressure from a media landscape that CBS says has made the genre harder to sustain. What is left now is not whether Colbert can still draw an audience for one more night; it is whether a network that called the move financial can persuade anyone that the sharpest moment in the show’s final chapter had nothing to do with politics at all.
For now, the lights are set to go out with Colbert still at the desk, finishing a run that started in 2015 and ended under a cloud of suspicion, celebrity sendoffs and one very old question about who really decides when a show is finished.
