The Late Show with Stephen Colbert finale was warm, funny, professionally executed, and predictable — like it’s supposed to be.
The night before Stephen Colbert’s last Late Show, I had a fantasy. Not a complicated one. I just wanted him to walk out, sit down behind his desk in his mid-price suit, and bring the character back — the bloviating, self-mythologizing conservative pundit from The Colbert Report years, the man who once testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee in character and told Congress with complete sincerity that migrant farmworkers take jobs Americans simply won’t do, like being on a hot farm in 100-degree heat picking beans, which it turned out no one wanted to do anyway, including the members of Congress who were not amused.
I wanted that guy, fully loaded, to look into the camera one last time and say something that would live forever as a gif and make a certain segment of the population feel very personally addressed. What I got instead was Paul McCartney turning off the lights. There was a wormhole. Stephen Colbert fanboyed, visibly, about his encounters with Pope Leo XIV, who was certainly not waiting backstage, though they did a bit where the Pope reportedly refused to come out of his dressing room, which was actually pretty funny. The finale was warm and professionally executed and exactly as good as it needed to be.
The show that was canceled twice
CBS announced earlier this year that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert would end, describing the decision as “purely financial against a challenging backdrop in late night” — language corporations deploy when they want to communicate regret without accepting responsibility for anything. Colbert had hosted since September 2015, taking over from David Letterman and inheriting a franchise that had been running, in one form or another, for 33 years. Worth noting: Paramount was in the middle of urgently seeking Trump administration approval for a major media merger at the time of the cancellation, and Colbert had spent a significant portion of his 11 years making Trump a reliable punchline. Whether there is a causal relationship between those facts is something CBS would prefer you not dwell on, and so naturally everyone has been dwelling on it constantly.
What goes underexamined in all of this is that Colbert was, in a meaningful sense, canceled once before. The Colbert Report ran nine years on Comedy Central, from 2005 to 2014, with Colbert playing a character so specific and so sustained that it became genuinely difficult to locate where the character ended and the actual person began. The conceit — a pompous, self-serious, “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot” conservative commentator, transparently satirizing the O’Reilly Factor-era pundit class — was so funny and so precisely executed that when Colbert moved to CBS and retired the character, a lot of people grieved that loss for years. Comedy Central’s lawyers actually sent a letter to CBS in 2016 claiming the character as their intellectual property, which tells you something about how distinct and valuable the bit had become. Colbert solved this by occasionally bringing out the character’s “identical twin cousin,” which is the kind of creative legal workaround that should be taught in law schools.
When he made the switch to CBS, Colbert explained the departure plainly: on Comedy Central, he felt the news “at you.” On CBS, the job was to feel the news “with you.” It’s a thoughtful distinction that also describes a somewhat less dangerous television program. The Late Show was consistently good — smart, warm, occasionally brilliant, and reliably showing up five nights a week for 11 years, which is itself a form of heroism that doesn’t get enough credit. But it was not The Colbert Report, and it was not going to be.
The last week
The final week of The Late Show programming had the texture of a very well-organized going-away party. Jon Stewart came. Steven Spielberg came. Bruce Springsteen came. Tom Hanks came. David Letterman — who handed Colbert the desk in the first place — came back. It was a farewell to Colbert and also a referendum on what that theater, the Ed Sullivan Theater, has meant across decades. Paul McCartney returned to the stage where the Beatles played in 1964, 62 years earlier, to help close it down, which is either deeply poetic or extremely convenient (McCartney was just on the Saturday Night Live finale last week) and probably both.
The finale opened with a montage of Colbert’s predecessors — Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, Letterman, even Samantha Bee, among others in the long lineage — that made the point: here is what this place has been, here is where we fit inside it, here is the tradition being handed down somewhere. The wormhole sequence brought in Colbert’s late-night contemporaries — Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver — in what was, in honest terms, a gimmicky skit of the kind you fall asleep to on a Tuesday night. On the finale, though, it was more. That is how finales work. The same segment airing on any other non-finale night would have been fine, then forgotten. Context is doing a lot of labor in late-night television.
What Colbert pointedly did not do was make the finale about Trump. He also did not deliver any kind of manifesto, nor did he appear to be auditioning for a legacy beyond the one he’d already built. He made jokes that were gentle and self-deprecating. He expressed gratitude that was clearly genuine. He talked about the Pope with the open, slightly embarrassing enthusiasm of someone who has just met his favorite band and wants everyone to know about it. He and McCartney sang “Hello Goodbye” while the entire staff danced around the stage, and McCartney literally turned off the lights in the theater, and that was that.
It was, as shows go, and to use the clinical term currently in circulation with my tween, a little mid. And the thing is — that is the correct outcome. You do not go into the office on your last day of work and jump up on the counters and, like David Byrne sang on Tuesday night’s episode, burn down the house. The Late Show is a job that exists to run at 11:35 p.m. and give people something mildly entertaining to put on while they’re winding down. That it occasionally produced something genuinely sharp — and it did — is a bonus feature, not the core product. Expecting Colbert to have gone out swinging in some politically charged, historically significant way would be like expecting a beloved ice cream shop owner to spend his retirement party delivering a speech about systemic failures in vanilla bean sourcing. He might have thoughts. They might even be correct thoughts. But that was not the job, and making it the job on the way out would have been a betrayal of everyone who showed up every night for the actual one.
Trump tried to make The Late Show more than it was by perceiving it as a genuine political threat. CBS, somewhat ironically, did the same thing upon canceling it, attaching financial rationale to a show that, by its very nature, resists that kind of gravity. The show was not a movement. It was not a referendum. It was 11 years of monologues and silly wormhole segments and celebrity interviews, delivered reliably, by a person who was very good at his job.
“We were lucky enough to be here for the last 11 years,” Colbert told his audience Thursday night. Then McCartney turned off the lights, and the Late Show franchise went dark after 33 years. That was it. That was right.
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