Intro for May 22, 2026

Dear Gossips,

After months of a long, slow march to the finale, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert ended last night, closing an eleven year, 1,801-episode run that began in 2015. This marks not only the end of Stephen Colbert’s tenure behind the desk at The Late Show, but also the end of CBS airing its own late-night talk show, which they have done since David Letterman hosted the first Late Show in 1993. Whatever one may think of Colbert, it is truly the end of an era, the ending of the Late Show, and maybe also the beginning of the end for all late-night television as we have known it since the era of Johnny Carson.

Colbert’s last show was a star-studded affair, with multiple celebrity guests popping up from the audience throughout the episode—the MVP is Tig Notaro, who showed up just to “enjoy historical events”—and peppering Colbert’s final monologue. It was a good monologue, with good jokes, and Colbert teasing his final guest.

The final guest turned out to be Sir Paul McCartney, which provides a nice symmetry, as The Beatles made their US television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, which taped in the same theater, now known as the Ed Sullivan Theater, as The Late Show. It was a solid, super-sized interview, but I sort of wish Colbert had done the “Colbert Questionert” bit, in which his famous friends interviewed HIM, as his last guest spot. But Colbert stated at the top of the show that they decided to more or less keep to the format of the show, so he ended where Paul McCartney began.

There were, of course, jokes about the show’s cancellation. In the monologue, the dolphins reference the statement that the cancellation was a “purely financial decision”, though if that was true, there were a LOT of changes the show could have made—which other late-night shows have already made—to reduce the budget. And there was an elaborate, and once again star-studded, wormhole bit in which the other members of Strike Force Five showed up as a wormhole prepared to swallow Colbert:

“At some point, this may come for all of our shows,” is such a bittersweet line, emphasis on bitter, because the decision to kowtow to Donald Trump by cancelling Colbert already feels dated and like a miscalculation. Trump’s approval rating is tanking, the American public hates his ballroom, and Bari Weiss, brought on by David Ellison to “remake” CBS News, is now on the verge of being “push[ed] aside” (CBS News is “hemorrhaging” viewers). Basically, every decision made to make Trump happy is being rejected out of hand.

I don’t think it will even take a full decade for this decision to look tremendously stupid. I think it will take like, one calendar year, at MOST. Again, it’s not really about any of our personal opinions about Stephen Colbert or The Late Show or even the state of late-night television, in general, we’re going to look back on this entire episode as the seminal incident of a deeply stupid yet catastrophic moment in our democracy. I bet Colbert and The Late Show end up being the flagship for how off-the-rails dumb yet dangerous the second Trump administration got. This will be in history books someday and the kids are simply not going to believe that freedom of speech almost died over TALK SHOW HOSTS. The darkest timeline and the stupidest timeline are one line.

As for Stephen Colbert, he’ll land on his feet somewhere. He’s already started a personal TikTok account, he’s got that Lord of the Rings movie to write, and I’m sure in the coming months we’ll hear some plans for his future. For now, we live with his farewell. Stephen Colbert went out on a high note and was more gracious than anyone deserved.

Live long and gossip,

Sarah