After nearly 11 years and 1,801 episodes, Stephen Colbert has left the desk of The Late Show. It wasn’t entirely his choice, of course. But in a media landscape where billion-dollar mergers, lawsuits, and political pressures suck up everything in the room, the Emmy-winning Colbert has been unjustly thrown into the void like the One Ring at Mount Doom. (Eerily fitting that the entity people are blaming for bending their knees to power is called Paramount.)
But in the last-ever broadcast of The Late Show on CBS on 21 May, the veteran host went out with his heart on his sleeve. He kicked off the show with a sincere two-minute speech where he thanked his audience for their “reciprocal emotional relationship.”
“We love doing this show for you, but what we really, really love, is doing this show with you,” Colbert said, who immediately took a silent pause—a safe assumption Colbert had to compose himself or else derail the night’s energy with premature tears. “I’ll say to you what I’ve said to every audience for the last 11 years and I’ve meant it every time: Have a good show, thanks for being here, and let’s do it, y’all.”
Then came an opening monologue that, despite the weight of its finality, Colbert insisted on it playing like another typical monologue. And it was mostly that, save for the parade of celebrity cameos like Bryan Cranston (who threw a fit that he wasn’t the last guest of the evening), Paul Rudd (who, with a banana in his mouth, also threw a fit that he wasn’t the last guest), and Tim Meadows (who, in his own fit, stole Rudd’s bananas).
Throughout the rest of the broadcast leading up to Colbert’s actual final interview with Paul McCartney, the set was plagued by technical glitches and freaky, cosmic aberrations. It led to one of the final sketches for Late Show’s storied history, in which Colbert finds an all-devouring green wormhole plaguing other late-night TV studios. Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jon Stewart, Elijah Wood, and yes, the Strike Force Five (Meyers, Oliver, and both Jimmys) all gathered in a pre-taped segment lampooning the existential dread underpinning late-night comedy amid Trump 2.0. Turns out, the ever-consuming gaping hole sucking up everything isn’t just an ever-consuming sucking hole. It’s a metaphor.
But while the entirety of The Late Show is now canonically sucked into a wormhole, the broadcast ended on a proper goodbye. Paul McCartney, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste, and Louis Cato banded together (literally) to play a sonic mashup of Costello’s “Jump Up” and The Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye” for an emotional fitting farewell to The Late Show. The show’s staff crowded the stage with the stars to jam out and bid adieu.
Beneath the performance, Colbert and McCartney snuck away to the basements to turn the lights out on the famous Ed Sullivan Theater. McCartney flipped the switch—a silent acknowledgement that The Beatles’ landmark appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 not only launched Beatlemania but also moved popular culture forward in a way we might never see again.
Despite the evening’s emotional heaviness, Colbert went out like a pro who only casually came off with zero fucks to give. (There’s a good bit where his band “illegally” performs the Peanuts theme song, because they know CBS will have to pay for it.) There’s no fear that a beloved pillar of late-night comedy will disappear forever—Colbert is at work on a massive new Lord of the Rings movie—but it’s more bittersweet that it had to happen this way. But as Colbert himself quotes from Tolkien in the wormhole sketch: All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us. For 11 years, Colbert made every minute count.
(Editor's note: And what do you know, Colbert returns to hosting duties... on a Michigan Public Access cable show.)
