‘We were lucky’: Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ bids farewell in final broadcast on CBS
CNN
By Brian Stelter, CNN
(CNN) — Stephen Colbert put on an emotional and existential final episode of “The Late Show” Thursday night, thanking his staff, studio audience and viewers for eleven years of laughs.
Colbert walked on stage to deafening cheers at the Ed Sullivan Theater, where longtime friends and VIPs filled the rows of seats.
“If you’re just tuning into ‘The Late Show,’ you missed a lot,” he quipped, alluding to CBS parent company Paramount’s controversial and politically charged decision to cancel the show.
Paramount cited financial pressures, but many Colbert fans blamed political pressures, namely President Donald Trump’s contempt for Colbert’s frequent criticism of him. Paramount was urgently seeking the Trump administration’s approval of a media merger at the time Colbert was given marching orders last summer.
Trump celebrated Colbert’s final show in a Truth Social post, writing, “Amazing he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. … Thank goodness he’s finally gone!”
Colbert notably did not mention Trump at all during Thursday’s finale. Nor did he dwell on the symbolism of his show being taken off the air.
Instead, he expressed appreciation for his years at CBS, choosing to be grateful for the time he had, rather than angry about it ending.
When Colbert noted that he was beginning the final episode and his fans booed, he put up his finger and said, “No, no, we were lucky enough to be here for the last 11 years. You can’t take this for granted.”
The monologue was interrupted by celebrity friends like Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd, and Tim Meadows, who all vied to be Colbert’s last guest. Ultimately it was Paul McCartney who sat down with Colbert for an in-depth interview.
“What could be more full circle than a crowd screaming for Paul McCartney at the Ed Sullivan Theater?” the show’s TikTok account asked in a post.
That’s because McCartney and The Beatles famously performed on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” on the same stage, in 1964.
On Thursday night, McCartney riffed about how he is resistant to change. Take the iPhone, with its constant software updates, he said: “I bought you. I don’t want you to change.”
Colbert sympathized, but seemed ready to adapt to the changing circumstances of his career.
In his monologue, he joked, “A lot of people have been asking me what I plan to do after tonight, and the answer is … drugs.”
But Colbert, true to self, also had some sincere things to say about his relationship with the late-night audience.
He harkened back to the way he introduced himself as a blowhard character on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report” in 2005: “Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news ‘at’ you.”
Once he moved from Comedy Central to the much bigger CBS stage in 2015, “I realized pretty soon … that our job over here was different,” he said. “We were here to feel the news with you. And I don’t know about you, but I sure have felt it.”
Colbert’s monologues and interviews tried to make sense of the news and noise. You’re “not crazy,” he sometimes said to viewers, when dissecting especially shocking stories.
Toward the end of Thursday’s finale, Colbert’s show imagined that an “interdimensional wormhole” had opened up at the theater and was threatening to consume all of late-night.
Colbert’s late night rivals-slash-friends arrived to help.
“At some point, this may come for all of our shows,” HBO’s John Oliver quipped.
ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, alluding to his brief suspension last year amid Trump administration pressure, said the wormhole had appeared at his show back then, “but it went away after about three days.”
Jon Stewart, who hosts “The Daily Show” for Paramount’s Comedy Central, delivered a joke at the parent company’s expense: “Paramount strongly believes in covering both sides of any black hole that is swallowing everything we know and love, and the coverage must also include the positive aspects of the insatiable emptiness.”
The episode came to a close with two taped performances: First, Colbert, Elvis Costello and former “Late Show” bandleader Jon Batiste performed an old favorite of Colbert’s, Costello’s 1977 demo “Jump Up” about lying, hypocritical politicians.
Then McCartney, Costello and others sang the Beatles classic “Hello, Goodbye.” The show concluded by imagining the Ed Sullivan Theater existing inside a snow globe – a reference to the ending of the 1980s drama “St. Elsewhere,” suggesting all the years were just a dream.
After Colbert and his producers taped the final episode on Thursday evening, they headed to a star-studded wrap party nearby.
Colbert has said in interviews that he hasn’t had much time to think ahead to what he might want to do next, though he is on the hook to help write a new “Lord of the Rings” movie.
“I don’t have much better of an answer than most college seniors do, which is I’ve got to finish this first, because it takes almost the entirety of my brain to do this show,” he told People magazine. “So we’ll land this plane and we’ll check out the view from there.”
Starting Friday, the 11:35 p.m. window belonging to “The Late Show” will be controlled by Byron Allen, whose media company leased the time slot from CBS for his show “Comics Unleashed.”
Allen’s talk show features a rotating roundtable of comics who tell stories and riff on each other’s jokes, and it’s purposefully evergreen in nature so that the episodes can be repeated later, which means it noticeably lacks any political humor.
CBS said Colbert’s set will be donated to the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.
As for the famed Ed Sullivan Theater stage where the show was produced for decades, there are no firm plans for what will become of the 100-year-old performance space.
“The fact that nothing’s gonna come in here breaks my heart,” Colbert told Architectural Digest in a video tour of the theater. “But someone will figure it out, and I wish them all the luck in the world — because they’re gonna love it.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
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