2 hours ago
2
The final episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert will air on 21 May, the host has announced.
Colbert, who has hosted the show since 2015, revealed the date on Monday during a taping of NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers to air on Tuesday night. Colbert will appear on Meyers’s show as a guest.
CBS had announced in July that The Late Show would come to an end in May, more than 30 years after its debut in 1993 under David Letterman. “It’s not just the end of the show. It is the end of the Late Show on CBS. I’m not being replaced – this is all just going away,” Colbert told his audience in July. A date for the final episode, however, had not been revealed.
News of the show’s cancellation came a few weeks after CBS’s parent company, Paramount, reached a $16m settlement with Donald Trump over what he called deceptive editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris. At the same time, Paramount was preparing for an $8.4bn merger with Skydance Media, which needed federal approval. Days before the cancellation was announced, Colbert described the settlement as a “big fat bribe”.
CBS called the show’s cancellation “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night”, saying it was “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount”.
But the cancellation of late night’s No 1 show sparked anger and sadness among viewers, entertainers and politicians. “Stephen Colbert, an extraordinary talent and the most popular late night host, slams the deal. Days later, he’s fired. Do I think this is a coincidence? NO,” Bernie Sanders wrote on X. Donald Trump, on the other hand, celebrated, writing on Truth Social: “I absolutely love that Colbert got fired.”
In the intervening months, Colbert has continued to mock the Trump administration. Last week, reflecting on the first year of the president’s second term, he lamented that the president had “monopolized our attention every second of every minute of every hour of every day”, with “some new Trump horror” always “dominating the headlines”.
“The last year has been exhausting,” he said. “And not just for us. That’s why Trump’s always falling asleep.”
