Robert Lloyd: ‘The Late Show' is ending, but not Stephen Colbert or late-night TV

In September 2015, when Stephen Colbert inherited CBS' "The Late Show" from David Letterman, its first and only host, late-night television was experiencing something of a golden age. The internet had yet to strangle linear television; it was taken for granted that any self-respecting broadcast network or ambitious cable station would air late-night (and even late, late-night) talk shows. Many of these had been on long enough to be considered institutions, and though hosts would come and go, they would typically occupy their chair for a good long time.

Each turnover being a rare event, most every fresh host has been greeted with a chorus of "Who? What? Why?" before time accords the newcomer a patina of inevitability. It was, I suppose, moderately surprising that, when Letterman - the greatest of them all with the possible exception of Johnny Carson- gave up "The Late Show" after 23 seasons, he was succeeded by a man whose previous job, of nine years, was playing a conservative pundit in an ironic half-hour political satire on basic cable, spun off from Jon Stewart's "The Daily Show."

But as the host of "The Colbert Report," Colbert's cultural penetration was deep, his fame already substantial. Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Esquire, Rolling Stone, Wired, Outside, Sports Illustrated and Dartmouth Alumni Magazine had all put him on their covers. He'd had an ice cream flavor, a bald eagle, a spider, a turtle and a space-station treadmill named after him; he testified before Congress in character on behalf of migrant workers; and coined the very useful word"truthiness." One knew to wait and see.

The Colbert who leaves "The Late Show" this week - not of his own volition- is and isn't the same Colbert who took it over. Like a long-serving politician, he has gone gray in office, and, like a few politicians, it has seasoned him. He's integrated the contractual need to entertain a mainstream audience with his own desire to offer an authentic (if partial) representation of himself: philosophical, thoughtful, spiritual, a Catholic humanist, with a deeper interest in eternal verities than the calamitous absurdities of the day - and made a show out of both those things, the highest-rated in late night.

These strands come together in the "Colbert Questionert," wherein the host poses a series of questions "honed to aerospace tolerances to penetrate the defenses of any guest, and penetrate to the core of their person and have them be fully known to the American people." ("I admire you overselling the bit," Letterman said when his turn came in 2024. "I learned it from you, Dad," Colbert replied, "I learned it from you.") Questions range from "What's the best sandwich?" (always first) to "scariest animal," to "What happens when we die?" to "The rest of your life in five words." You could play along at home.

There are the celebrities, of course, with whom he talks in an interested way, listening, responding, getting laughs, getting his guests to get laughs, allowing things to go off-track or to go long, when the going is good. (Extended interviews would find their way onto YouTube.) Conversations could get deep and personal. Guests may come with a product to promote, but that's just the gas on which talk shows run; the trip was about something else.

"I have gotten to a place where I don't want a lot from the audience other than to make them laugh," Colbert told John Mulaney in 2020, "and to make a connection that my internal anxieties, as I express them externally through the joke, when it makes them laugh, I have the sense of camaraderie and community that I'm not crazy to feel this way because they wouldn't laugh unless they recognized it in somebody else. And it might be an anxiety about life, or death, or about what happened today in the news."

Colbert's dismissal, it's common knowledge by now, followed hard upon Paramount, the network's owner, settling a Trump nuisance suit for $16 million; Colbert suggested on air that it was a "big fat bribe" to get FCC approval for its sale to the Trump-friendly Skydance Media, and within a couple of days "The Late Show" was no more. ("A screeching halt by other hands," Letterman called it on his valedictory appearance last week, during which he directed "the wanton destruction of CBS property," throwing chairs from the set off the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater.) With the death of the Taylor Tomlinson-hosted panel show "After Midnight," of which Colbert was an executive producer, the network is out of the late-night business. (They are leasing the space to the independently produced "Comics Unleashed With Byron Allen.")

Still, the reunion last week on "The Late Show" of "Strike Force Five," the podcast team assembled by Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, John Oliver and Jimmy Kimmel during the 2023 writers' strike to benefit their staffs, was a reminder that late night has life in it yet. It's true that the talk ecosystem has changed in the last decade, as a hundred podcasts have bloomed, including ones helmed by late-night veterans Conan O'Brien, Jon Stewart, former CBS late, late-night host Craig Ferguson and Letterman. Nevertheless, as Kimmel noted, "People have a lot of options, but they keep coming to us."

As of next week, Colbert won't be there. "You can take a man's show, you can't take a man's voice," Letterman had said; for the moment that voice will be co-writing a "Lord of the Rings" sequel, which in a sense, to mix movie metaphors, is Tolkien superfan Colbert's version of "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine." We await with interest.

Meanwhile, he asked guest Julia Louis-Dreyfus if she had any advice for recovering from the loss of a long-running show.

"Do you drink?" she asked.

"I'm pretty good at it," Colbert replied.

"You'll be fine."

Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.

This story was originally published May 21, 2026 at 11:21 AM.