Late night belongs to the past now

Stephen Colbert’s final Late Show wasn’t steeped in the history of the show or its host as it was TV history as a whole.

By Erik Adams | May 22, 2026 | 12:00pm

(Photo: Scott Kowalchyk)

TV Features Stephen Colbert

You could forgive Stephen Colbert for indulging in a little reminiscence the past few nights. His time at The Late Show was coming to an end, after all, and with it the entire Late Show itself—the first legitimate network TV challenger to The Tonight Show’s stranglehold on America’s bedtime viewing habits. (“Network” qualifier forever necessary since The Arsenio Hall Show had managed the feat first, albeit in syndication.) It was a historic occasion—not least of all because the show was arguably done in by presidential decree—so the sentimentality of farewells from favorite guests and cheeky looks back at the “worst” of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert were warranted.

That all culminated in Thursday night’s finale, which wasn’t so much steeped in the history of The Late Show or Colbert’s three decades in late night as it was the history of television as a whole. It began with the good old-fashioned found-footage mashup in the cold open, which assembled a toast to and roast of Colbert from talk-shows clips that reached as far back as The Tonight Show’s first two hosts, Steve Allen and Jack Paar. That sense escalated with the entrance of Colbert’s final guest, Paul McCartney, a flashy booking marking the significance of a talk-show franchise as well as its home base. The Ed Sullivan Theater hosted The Late Show longer than either David Letterman or Stephen Colbert, but it welcomed McCartney decades before either of them, when The Beatles brought the British Invasion to CBS across three episodes of Sullivan’s eponymous variety show in 1964.

An audience with McCartney and a microphone to his right during a show-closing rendition of “Hello, Goodbye” were appropriately celebratory ways to send Colbert off. But they also drove home another detail about the finale: Unlike Letterman’s sign-off in 2015, there was nothing to look forward to on the other side of this one. No one’s inheriting the Late Show desk. Nobody’s raiding clubs, theaters, TikTok, the Dropout roster, or the Onion newsroom to assemble a new talk-show staff and tasking them with getting topical, silly, or some mixture of the two on a national stage. Colbert’s the one with a future here, free to apply his intelligence and go-for-broke screen presence to any number of creative endeavors now that the golden handcuffs of joking about the news every night have been taken from him. It’s late-night TV that’s feeling even more like a relic of the past than it did before.

Consider the contents of Colbert’s final Late Show. Of the programs featured in the opening montage, the most recent to premiere was The Rundown With Robin Thede, which debuted in 2017—and concluded in 2018. Nodding toward The Ed Sullivan Theater’s history gave the finale context and heft, but it also meant Colbert and McCartney spent the first segment of their interview discussing events that took place more than 60 years ago. A running gag about a glowing green wormhole threatening to swallow the theater whole—and maybe all of late night with it—pepped up the usual talk-show valediction with some visual pizazz and Colbert-appropriate sci-fi nonsense. But its final beat alluded to a primetime drama that went off the air back when Letterman was still on NBC.

This is a bitter pill to swallow so soon after the renewed relevance and urgency that surged through late night in the second half of 2025. But that had little to do with anything new that Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel were doing or saying episode to episode—it was a response to the harassment of President Donald Trump, media conglomerates happy to be his mouthpiece, and the independent communications-regulating body that he definitely, in no way, absolutely does not hold sway over (and how dare you even suggest that?). All that right-wing noise was generated over pretty typical Late Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live material: Colbert putting the actions of his corporate overlords in comedically straightforward terms; Kimmel pointing out the hypocrisies of MAGA.

The news was in the disproportionate consequences handed down from supposed watchdogs of the American airwaves, who were acting as if they, like a growing portion of the American public, hadn’t tuned into either show in years. When the president and first lady tried pulling the same shit last month, attempting to tie the shooting at the 2026 White House Correspondents’ Dinner to jokes Kimmel made before the incident, the news cycle was much shorter, the outcry more subdued. Maybe enough people were paying attention now to know the wisecracks were nothing out of the ordinary. Maybe enough levelheaded people said, “C’mon: It’s only a talk-show monologue.”

Late-night TV will soldier on after The Late Show’s demise: CBS may have accepted a pay-for-play arrangement in lieu of hiring a Colbert successor, but it’s not like NBC’s going to put Saturday Night Live out to pasture anytime soon. The sense that was harder to fight during last night’s episode was that there hasn’t been anything new that’s managed to stick in this portion of the broadcast day since Last Week Tonight started in 2014—and even that show is largely a variation on the sort of current affairs commentary host John Oliver did on The Daily Show. There was some experimental, seat-of-your-pants freshness in John Mulaney’s Everybody’s In LA and Everybody’s Live, even if that freshness came in conspicuously retro packaging and bore distinct whiffs of Lettermanesque puckishness, Johnny Carson-like cocktail-party chatter, and Dick Cavett-style meetings of the minds. Sadly, one of the quieter industry stories to break during Colbert’s extended curtain call was that Netflix doesn’t expect Mulaney to make another season of Everybody’s Live “right now.”

I wish he would, the same way Conan O’Brien’s two (going on three) Oscar ceremonies make me think he should get out from behind the podcast mic and back in front of a studio audience. I don’t want this type of thing to go away. The Late Show finale made the past’s claim over late night evident, but that doesn’t mean the timeslot or the format best suited for it need to be retired. There’s history there worth preserving, and traditions worth honoring, and Colbert’s final episode put a premium on both. These are nostalgic impulses, but not necessarily reactionary ones. Not so long as, like Colbert did by inviting the Late Show staff to the stage to jam with him, McCartney, Elvis Costello, and returning bandleader Jon Batiste, you’re committed to spreading the joy of the ritual, rather than hoarding it among the already initiated.

There’s life in the old ways yet. It echoes through the halls of an empty Ed Sullivan theater, in the words of a classic song given an updated purpose. For late night to join the rest of us in the present and beyond, somebody has to say “hello” when others would say “goodbye.”

Erik Adams is The A.V. Club’s senior TV editor.

Join the discussion...

Keep scrolling for more great stories.