Everybody loves a funeral, turns out, as Stephen Colbert just posted his highest weeknight ratings ever—just in time to go off the air forever. This is per Variety, which reports that last night’s series finale for Colbert’s late-night talk show was viewed by 6.74 million people, a number second only to those posted by the show’s post-Super Bowl episodes, which have sometimes gotten as high as 20.5 million viewers.
And, look: Nobody’s going to claim that a one-off ratings bump driven by mourning TV viewers tuning in to see which stops Colbert pulled out as he charmingly burnt the whole thing down means much in the grand scheme of things. (In fact, it’s led some commentators, looking at the wider history of late-night, to note that Colbert’s finale numbers were less than half what Jay Leno and Dave Letterman got with their final shows in 2014 and 2015, respectively.) But it is a reminder of the irony—which Colbert and his pals noted more than once during the show’s final broadcast—that Late Show was being canceled while being the top-rated show in late-night comedy, in what CBS has repeatedly insisted was a purely “financial decision.”
For what it’s worth, the 6.74 million number tops Colbert’s debut episode back in 2015, which scored 6.55 million viewers; it’s also a bit less than triple his average during Q1 of 2026, which saw roughly 2.7 million people, split between live-viewing and delayed, tune in to The Late Show most nights. All of which was apparently losing CBS a claimed $40 million a year, which it will now attempt to recoup by abandoning the late-night time slot entirely, and instead leasing the whole thing out to Byron Allen and Comics Unleashed. Which, as a purely financial decision, probably does make a certain sense—even if it’s going to leave 6.7 million people sorely disappointed.
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