Stephen Colbert taped his final episode of The Late Show on Wednesday and it aired Thursday, May 21 — his 1,801st episode and the last one CBS will produce. The network is not replacing him. The slot reverts to local affiliates, and the 33-year-old franchise that David Letterman launched in 1993 is over.
The finale itself
The show ran a planned 17 minutes long, ending at 12:54 a.m. rather than 12:37. Paul McCartney closed the broadcast by performing The Beatles' "Hello, Goodbye," with Colbert pulling his staff and writers' room onto the stage in front of the band. The guest list across the final week read like a curated wake for late-night itself: Barack Obama (a 2.67 million-viewer episode on Wednesday), David Letterman in his first Late Show return since 2015, Tom Hanks, Pedro Pascal, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and the Strike Force Five reunion of Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver appearing together with Colbert. The Strokes and the Foo Fighters played the music slots.
The ratings ending
Colbert exits as the linear-ratings leader of late night — between 2.4 and 2.8 million viewers an episode this season, well ahead of Kimmel — and posted his three strongest live-plus-same-day numbers of the year in the final week. That is the strange shape of the ending: CBS is closing the most-watched show in the format because the underlying economics no longer pay for a writers' room, a band, an audience, and a celebrity-booking operation against what the hour earns. The monologue still travels; it just travels as a YouTube clip the next morning, monetized at a fraction of the broadcast rate.
What follows
Colbert is moving on to write the next Peter Jackson-directed Lord of the Rings film. The career continues. The institution does not. We previewed the finale a week ago as the end of a shared nightly clock — a piece of monoculture that survived everything streaming threw at it because it was cheap to make and ran on the news, until even that math broke. On Thursday night at 11:35, that clock stopped.
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