The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will be ending in May 2026, the American television network CBS announced in a public statement released on Thursday, 17 July.
Colbert took over David Letterman’s timeslot in 2015, drawing heavy criticism from conservatives at the time. Prior to getting his late-night host gig on CBS, the comedian hosted The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, which was a parody of conservative political commentator Bill O’Reilly’s show The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News. Many felt that Colbert would be too partisan to be the face of a mainstream talk/comedy show, which features celebrity interviews in every episode.
As expected, Colbert was a lot harsher on Republican figures than Democrat figures in his nightly monologues, which only exacerbated when Donald Trump started to campaign for President in late 2015. In recent years, he would often have Democratic lawmakers on his show as guests instead of entertainers.
Colbert has reacted to the news of his cancellation on his show. He has revealed that he will not be replaced, and thus The Late Show, originally started by David Letterman in 1993, will be coming to an end after 33 years.
The CBS press release claims that the cancellation was ‘purely a financial decision’. Colbert’s ratings have been declining since his takeover. During the 2024 election season, the show was drawing about 2 million viewers per night. That was bested by conservative comedian Greg Gutfeld’s late-night show on Fox News, despite it being on a cable channel, as opposed to Colbert’s show on a terrestrial network.
In the last few months, however, Colbert’s ratings grew to around 2.4 million viewers per night, according to the Nielsen media research company. This, apparently, still was not enough to make the show profitable. While Colbert was able to grow his audience since President Trump took office for the second time, the viewerships of left-leaning cable channels MSNBC and CNN have declined sharply at the same time.
Jimmy Kimmel, who hosts a similarly, if not even more partisan late-night show on ABC, has already alluded to the fact that he will not be extending his contract that ends in 2026 either.
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