Colbert sets the date for the very last Late Show

Canceled over to alleged financial concerns by the same company that overpaid for Bari Weiss, The Late Show has been a staple of CBS since the early '90s.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  January 27, 2026 | 9:11pm
Courtesy of CBS
TV News The Late Show With Stephen Colbert
Colbert sets the date for the very last Late Show

After saying goodbye to After Midnight and its remaining credibility, CBS is poised to lose another cornerstone of its network: The Late Show. During an appearance on NBC’s Late Night With Seth Meyers, set to air tonight, per Variety, Stephen Colbert announced that the final episode of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert will air on CBS on May 21. Fired amid a multi-million-dollar attempt to curry favor with the Trump administration, Colbert has been a dead man walking on his talk show for months. Nevertheless, the host has used his remaining time on the air to do what he most believes he was fired for: Making jokes at the president’s expense. And here we were thinking that comedy was finally legal again.

The network made the call last summer and expected the public to believe that Colbert’s very public shit-canning was a “purely financial decision” that had nothing to do with Colbert criticizing CBS’ parent company, Paramount, for paying Trump “a big fat bribe” of $16 million to settle the administration’s $20 billion lawsuit against 60 Minutes. In the time since CBS canceled Colbert, Paramount CEO David Ellison paid Bari Weiss $150 million to punt 60 Minutes exposés into American concentration camps, have Tony Dokoupil salute Marco Rubio, and generate some mock-ups of a show called Whiskey Fridays With Tony Dokoupil, sponsored by Jack Daniel’s, which was apparently too embarrassing even for “the best-capitalized media startup in the world.”

 

 
Join the discussion...
Keep scrolling for more great stories.