The Late Show with Stephen Colbert takes its final bow | The Excerpt

On the Monday, May 18, 2026, episode of The Excerpt podcast: Late‑night TV has long served as a shared end‑of‑day ritual, shaping political and cultural conversation. With “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” coming to an end, questions remain about the viability of traditional late-night TV. USA TODAY TV Critic Kelly Lawler joins The Excerpt to discuss what the show’s finale says about the future of late‑night television.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Dana Taylor:

For decades, late night television has provided us with a shared end of the day ritual made up of monologues and jokes that shape our political conversations. Well, Stephen Colbert didn't invent late night TV, he sharpened it. Last July, when Colbert announced the end of the Late Show franchise on CBS, many wondered what happens when shows that function as cultural town squares begin to disappear?

Hello and welcome to USA TODAY's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Monday, May 18th, 2026. Joining me to discuss rising production costs, shifts in viewing preferences, and the demise of one of the pillars of late night television is USA TODAY TV Critic Kelly Lawler. It's good to have you here, Kelly.

Kelly Lawler:

Thank you so much for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Kelly, this might seem like a strange question following his more than a decade as host of the Late Show, but who is Stephen Colbert?

Kelly Lawler:

Yeah, I mean, Stephen Colbert is one of the biggest names in American comedy. He got his start in improv along with a lot of other comedians in Gen X who are household names like Amy Poehler and a lot of people from SNL. And he first came to real national attention as a correspondent on The Daily Show when Jon Stewart was the host full-time in the early 2000's. And he had a character and that character was very influenced by the politics of the time by the George W. Bush era Republican Party. And that character was named Stephen Colbert, but it wasn't the man himself. And he was so popular satirizing the conservative right at the time that he was eventually given his own show on Comedy Central, The Colbert Report, not Report. And that was followed Jon Stewart. The two kind of marched together in this heyday of Comedy Central late night television.

When David Letterman decided in 2015 that he was going to retire from the Late Show, CBS picked Colbert, who was already in the CBS family, Comedy Central and CBS have been owned by the same parent company for a long time. And he's been reinvented on the Late Show as Stephen Colbert the person instead of Stephen Colbert, the character.

Dana Taylor:

As I mentioned, this is about more than the end of Stephen Colbert's run as host of the show. Can you briefly touch on the highlights of the iconic Late Night Show, moments that help define it like David Letterman's top 10 list, for example, and then how Colbert also helped shape that legacy.

Kelly Lawler:

Yeah. The Late Show was created for David Letterman. In the early 1990's, Johnny Carson, who had hosted The Tonight Show on NBC, really the foundational program for this kind of genre of television and he was retiring. And David Letterman had been at NBC for a long time hosting Late Night, which aired after the Tonight Show and had made a name for himself doing this kind of wacky experimental comedy that worked really well at that hour of the night. And when Carson retired, NBC picked Jay Leno to host The Tonight Show, which massively offended David Letterman. There was a very well publicized fight. There has been books written about it. There was an HBO TV movie about it.

But what ended up happening is that Letterman went to CBS. They created the Late Show for him and he competed with Leno at the time slot and he won for a while, but over the course of their competing years in late night, the Tonight Show still kind of won out. But Letterman's Late Show was a lot different than Late Night. It was much more mainstream. His most famous bits were the top 10 list, as you mentioned, which he did pretty much every night of top 10 something that was relevant to the news or something happening in pop culture at the time. Stupid pet tricks was one of his biggest sketches, which is exactly what it sounds like and he made it work in a way that was not so stupid.

Some of the biggest moments in his career, people think of Drew Barrymore jumping up on his desk when she was in the early part of her adult career. They think of Joaquin Phoenix doing that very strange interview with the beard and the sunglasses when he was doing the publicity stunt for his movie, I'm Still Here. And you think of how that influenced Letterman's career, otherwise he hosted the Oscars because of the success of that show and he handed it off to Colbert and Letterman was a very Hollywood guy. He came up through that LA style of comedy and he was really concerned with actors, actresses and the way that show business was going.

Colbert's comedy was political. He came from Comedy Central's The Colbert Report and The Daily Show. And even though he was no longer pretending to be a right-wing conservative pundit, he was political and that's the brand that CBS hired when they hired him. And so he took the Late Show and he made it more political. His monologues were more of the monologue was taken up by politics than in Letterman's era. More of the bits are about politics. And Colbert, the direction of his show was really shaped by where politics were going.

Donald Trump was elected in 2016 for the first time and all of late night comedy was shifted into commenting on him every single night, but it didn't really stop during the intervening Biden administration. So Colbert gets called out as political all the time, but it is what CBS bought and paid for when they hired him.

Dana Taylor:

Kelly, we'll get to the money in a moment, but first political commentary has long been a part of late night television. The timing of the cancellation came shortly after Colbert criticized Paramount for settling a lawsuit brought by President Donald Trump. How clear is it what role, if any, that criticism played in the decision to cancel a legacy show?

Kelly Lawler:

Paramount in their official statements has denied that there was any consideration for politics as to the reason they canceled the program. None of us can know who weren't in the room. I will say that the context around his cancellation wasn't just the fact that he had criticized Paramount's settlement with Donald Trump at the time. Paramount was in the middle of trying to get a merger approved by the Trump administration with Skydance Entertainment. That merger has since gone through and not only were they trying to get the merger approved, Skydance is headed by David Ellison, who is the son of Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle and a major Trump donor.

So when you're talking about the politics, there's much more than any one thing Colbert could have said about his parent company or about Donald Trump. People involved in making the decisions for the future of CBS have their own political affiliations. And again, we're not in the room. I can't tell you exactly why, but I can tell you that all of this is swirling around as the show is nearing its end.

Dana Taylor:

You've written about our deep and meaningful history when it comes to political comedy, satire and commentary. Can you speak to the role of political comedy in American society?

Kelly Lawler:

I think political comedy is foundational to American society. We think of Benjamin Franklin's join or die political cartoon as something serious, but political cartoons are a comedic part of American tradition. And there's Mark Twain. There's Johnny Carson himself in the mid-20th century and Bob Hope, who we think of as gentle, warm entertainers, but who had a lot of sharp things to say about the politics of the time. They're just not our politics. So we forget those joke of the days when the days are so many decades in the past.

I think political comedy isn't going anywhere. Colbert may leave CBS at 11:35, but he has a big career ahead of him. His peers have found new and old life. Jon Stewart is back hosting The Daily Show once a week. John Oliver has a show on HBO has a very different business model and a very different model for the show.

I think we're at definitely an inflection and evolution point. I think what happens over the next year or so will kind of determine the overall direction of this important pillar of entertainment and politics.

Dana Taylor:

Now to the economics of late night talk shows. Paramount was losing reported $40 million a year. They said the reason for the cancellation was quote purely financials. Anyone seriously arguing now that money wasn't a major or even the decisive factor here?

Kelly Lawler:

I mean, lots of television shows lose money all the time is really the big deal. Yes, it's probably been losing money. The longer a TV show of any kind, late night, episodic, or prime time, daytime. The longer they go on, the more expensive they get because the talent is able to negotiate higher salaries in their contracts. Everyone quotes the famous statistic that in the final season of Friends, the cast of six was making a million dollars per episode and that was in '90s money. And so yes, Colbert's salary goes up. Everyone who works with him, their salary goes up, the writers, the producers. Everything gets more expensive the longer it goes on.

The Tonight Show has been going on with Jimmy Fallon for a little more than Colbert's tenure. Late night with Seth Meyers has been going on for that long. There are other cost-cutting measures that can be made. One thing is dropping Friday nights, one thing is dropping a band. So I would argue that it cannot possibly be a purely economic decision because economics is more complicated than green lighting or canceling a show in our current media landscape. Late night ratings are going down. YouTube, TikTok are all peeling away viewers who want that kind of news of the day commentary, but I don't think we can argue that the genre is completely unviable in our current day and age because they aren't all falling like dominoes. Jimmy Kimmel has survived a major scandal and his show is still on the air.

Dana Taylor:

Well, you mentioned Kimmel. You also mentioned Fallon, both still on the air hosting late night comedy shows. But if a top rated show like the Late Show can't sustain itself financially, are we seeing clear evidence of a broader structural collapse of the traditional late night model?

Kelly Lawler:

I mean, it's totally possible. It's easier to cancel a second show after our first show's been canceled. Hollywood is very influenced by peer pressure. And also if NBC has been wanting to cancel The Tonight Show, for instance, it's easier to say, "Well, look, they canceled Late Show over at CBS. It's just not a viable genre anymore." I don't think that's what's happening. We haven't seen signs from the executives talking to the press. We haven't heard rumors or inklings of more cancellations on the way right now. In the next five years, I wouldn't be surprised if late night was replaced with something else, but I also wouldn't be surprised if it was still going and I wouldn't be surprised if CBS changed its mind and hired someone else to do something similar but not the same as Late Show.

Dana Taylor:

Kelly, has Colbert publicly discussed what comes next for him?

Kelly Lawler:

No, and I think that's the number one question he's going to get from friends, family, any reporters he ever talks to until he does announce something. I think he has a lot of options. If I were a Hollywood executive anywhere that wasn't Paramount, I would be talking to him. I would be offering him loads and loads of cash to come where I am because he's only going to get more popular after he leaves. CBS is a platform, but personalities are what builds brands in Hollywood right now. And there's social media, yes, which is eating into late night audience, but it allows Colbert's fans to follow him wherever he goes and that will be valuable to someone.

Dana Taylor:

Kelly Lawler is a TV critic for USA TODAY. Thank you so much for sharing your insights here, Kelly.

Kelly Lawler:

Thank you for having me.

Dana Taylor:

Thanks for listening. I'm Dana Taylor. What story would you like to hear next? You can tell us at [email protected].