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Stephen Colbert wraps The Late Show on Thursday after 33 years on CBS, with David Letterman, Bruce Springsteen and Jon Stewart in the final-week guest chairs.
Stephen Colbert tapes the final Late Show on Thursday, May 21, ending a 33-year CBS franchise that has held the 11:35 p.m. slot since David Letterman’s 1993 arrival. The network has not extended the brand, has not named a successor, and is selling the time slot back to affiliates.
The week’s guest list is, by design, a wake. Jon Stewart, Steven Spielberg and David Byrne sit with Colbert Tuesday night. Bruce Springsteen takes Wednesday.
David Letterman, who built the show before handing it to Colbert in 2015, already did his lap. He sat in the guest chair last Thursday for what amounted to an extended eulogy. The standing ovation, by all accounts, went long.
Letterman has not stayed quiet about why this is happening. In a New York Times interview ahead of the finale, the former host called the cancellation a botched holdup and accused CBS of being lying weasels. On Colbert’s couch the week before, he closed with a riff on Edward R. Murrow’s signoff, in unprintable form.
CBS has held to one line throughout. The network has called the move purely a financial decision, unrelated to the show’s performance, content or any broader corporate activity at parent company Paramount. The Late Show currently leads the timeslot at 2.7 million viewers a night and won its first Emmy for Variety Talk Series in 2025.
The chronology is harder to ignore. Colbert publicly called a $16 million Paramount settlement of a Trump lawsuit a big fat bribe in July 2025. Days later, CBS announced the cancellation. Weeks after that, the FCC approved Paramount’s $8 billion merger with Skydance.
The Washington Post’s reading of where late night goes next frames the Late Show’s end as the first major structural break in a format that has been quietly bleeding budget and audience for years.
The 11:35 p.m. slot will not stay dark. Effective May 22, Byron Allen’s Allen Media Group takes over the hour with the syndicated Comics Unleashed; the 12:37 a.m. slot goes to the game show Funny You Should Ask. Both arrive on time-buy agreements, not network productions.
Colbert’s peers have rallied. Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and John Oliver all dropped by the Ed Sullivan Theater earlier this week in a joint set Colbert joked left Stewart as the format’s designated survivor.
The deeper question is whether late-night television as a category survives the next contract cycle. The Late Show was profitable, popular and prestigious. CBS shut it down anyway.
The Ed Sullivan Theater, where the show has taped since 1993, hosts its final taping Thursday.
