Soon-to-be former late-night host Stephen Colbert is set to give his final curtain call in just over four months — and he’s “not thrilled about it.”
Colbert, 61, revealed Wednesday that the last episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” will air on May 21, ending an 11-year run on CBS.
“It feels real,” he said during an appearance on “Late Night with Seth Meyers. “Now there’s four months left and I, you know, the shows are fun to do, but what I really love is the people I do it with.”
“It feels real now. I’m not thrilled with it,” he said, teasing that he plans on doing “something else together” with his team after the show’s cancellation.
In July, CBS had announced that the “Late Show,” which first aired with David Letterman in 1993, would be shut down after the 2025-2026 broadcast schedule.
Colbert, who replaced Letterman in 2015, has not taken kindly to his highly publicized departure.
“You can do comedy in a lot of different places. There’s no place like the Ed Sullivan Theater, but it’s really the people. Thats what I care about, that’s really what I’m going to miss more than anything.”
CBS said it was a “financial decision” to cancel the long-running show, as under Colbert, “The Late Show” lost.
“Colbert loses $40 million to $50 million a year, so (co-CEO) George Cheeks just decided to pull the plug,” a source told The Post’s Charles Gasparino.
In Quarter 4 TV ratings, “The Late Show” led all late-night talk shows with 2.69 million total viewers over 37 shows, The Late Nighter reported.
Despite a 5 percent drop in viewership over the third quarter when Colbert saw a week-long spike after the announcement, “The Late Show” remained at the top in viewership in all late-night show broadcasts, ahead of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!”
After his cancellation was announced, “The Late Show” was nominated and won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Talk Series, Colbert’s first while leading the show.
However, Colbert’s show was projected to hit record lows for January viewership in the key 25- to 54-year-old demographic, with an average of only 285,000 viewers per show, The Post reported.
Colbert and other liberal comedians were quick to point blame at President Trump and FCC Chair Brendan Carr after CBS settled a lawsuit with the president for $16 million over a deceptively edited “60 Minutes” interview with then-Vice President Kamala Harris.
Colbert called himself a martyr of free speech and vowed to ramp up criticism of Trump in his last episodes.
“They made one mistake, they left me alive. For the next 10 months, the gloves are off,” he told his audience in July.
On January 22, Colbert said the FCC — led by Carr — was trying to silence him, Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel after the agency implemented a new guidance for political guest appearances.
The FCC is announcing plans to enforce long-dormant rules on appearances by political candidates on network talk shows. Oh, no. They’ve awakened the long-dormant rules, not seen since the mind-bending horrors of the pre-Euclidean variety show Cthulhu Tonight.”
Colbert claimed that the FCC’s new guidance is “clearly an attempt to silence me, Jimmy and Seth,” before looking into the camera and directly addressing the agency.
“Hey, I’m flattered you think that appearing on my show has the power to affect politics in any way, OK? I’ve been doing this job for 21 years, and let me tell you something, buddy. If our government had turned out the way I had chosen, you would not have the power to make this announcement,” he railed.
Between 2022 and 2025, “The Late Show” had booked over 176 left-leaning guests and only one Republican, according to a study by media watchdog NewsBusters.
“Colbert’s show has been late-night group therapy for liberals,” NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck told The Post. “Americans have continually shown they no longer have the time or patience for such partisan sneering masquerading as comedy.”
The post Stephen Colbert reveals date of his final ‘Late Show’ episode: ‘Not thrilled with it’ appeared first on New York Post.
