Stephen Colbert said in a new interview that CBS may have saved his life by canceling “The Late Show,” noting that it takes “a lot of bone marrow” to make the late night series.
Colbert is set to host his final “Late Show” episode on Thursday, May 21. The episode will also bring the franchise to an end, wrapping up the 33-year run that began with original host David Letterman in 1993. In an interview with People published Tuesday, Colbert said the abrupt cancellation may end up being better for him in the long run than if it had continued.
“It takes a lot of bone marrow to do the show every day, and now I’ll be stepping down with enough time, enough energy to do other things that I want to do,” Colbert told the outlet, wondering if CBS had “saved my life” by canceling the late night series that he has hosted since Sept. 2015. Not that he didn’t enjoy it.
“I tried never to take for granted filming in the Ed Sullivan Broadway theater,” Colbert told People. “Having that tremendous audience, or having the ability to work with the funniest people I know every day and make jokes about the things that make me most anxious.”
While he is in the midst of writing a new “Lord of the Rings” movie with his son Peter, Colbert still does not know what he is going to do next full-time.
“The show’s like a flaming toboggan ride every day and the trick is to not hit any trees on your way down the mountain,” he said. “There’s so much to think about to do the show. So 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. So we’ll land this plane and we’ll check out the view from there.”
“But I’m available. Yes,” he added. Colbert additionally said he will be content to not be a part of the daily news conversation anymore.
“I’ll never stop caring about my country,” he explained. “I’m a perfectly fine fan of me, but I am not of the opinion that if my voice is missing from the national conversation, the republic will turn awry.”
On Monday, Colbert kicked off his final week on “The Late Show” with a special compilation episode highlighting all the bits that were “too stupid, too messy and too outrageous” to make it onto the late night series over the course of its 11 seasons. The entire, extended episode was subsequently posted on YouTube.
Regarding his final “Late Show” sign-off, Colbert told People he intends to make it “something simple” and that he hopes viewers will remember the show for the laughs and escapist thrills it provided them.
“I hope they laughed. I hope they felt better at the end of the day,” Colbert said of the show’s fans. “That’s it. We’re there. We’re the last thing you see. A lot of things happen in a day, but we bat last, and so we get the last take that people hear before they go to bed, and I hope it made their day better.”
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