The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will end in May 2026 after 33 years on air, the CBS television network announced in a surprise statement on Thursday.
The move “is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night [television]” and “is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters”, CBS said.
Colbert broke the news at a taping of the show, earlier on Thursday evening, triggering a chorus of boos from the live studio audience.
“I do want to say that the folks at CBS have been great partners,” he said, adding: “And of course, I’m grateful to you, the audience, who have joined us every night in here, out there, all around the world.”
The move brings a close to the more than three-decade old programme, leaving the network without a late-night comedy talk show for the first time since 1993.
Colbert, who took over the CBS programme from David Letterman in 2015, has become one of US President Donald Trump’s staunchest critics on late-night TV.
The presenter was informed of the decision to cancel his show on Wednesday night, he told the audience during his Thursday monologue.
“Yeah, I share your feeling,” he said as the crowd in the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York shouted “no” and booed.
“It’s not just the end of our show, but it’s the end of The Late Show on CBS. I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away,” he continued. “It is a fantastic job. I wish somebody else was getting it.”
The announcement comes two weeks after CBS parent company Paramount settled a lawsuit with Trump stemming from a CBS interview with his 2024 election rival Kamala Harris.
The Late Show was created by CBS, the BBC’s US news partner, in 1993 as a competitor to NBC’s own talk show. It came after a dispute between hosts David Letterman and Jay Leno over who should succeed Johnny Carson on the wildly-popular Tonight Show.
Before taking over the job at The Late Show, Colbert had been the host of “The Colbert Report” on Comedy Central – a programme which skewered US conservative politics and culture.
The announcement of the ending of the programme came amid talks between Paramount and Skydance Media to merge the two companies, a move that would require approval from the US federal government.
Democratic Senator Adam Schiff posted on X on Thursday that he had finished taping an interview with Colbert just before the cancellation was announced.
He questioned whether the announcement was tied to the $16m (£12m) settlement the network agreed to pay to Trump, writing: “If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserved to know”.
Another US senator, Elizabeth Warren, echoed those sentiments, posting on X: “America deserves to know if his show was cancelled for political reasons.”
The settlement came after Trump sued CBS last October alleging the network had deceptively edited an interview that aired on its 60 Minutes news programme with his presidential election rival Kamala Harris, to “tip the scales in favour of the Democratic party”.
Paramount said it would pay to settle the suit, but with the money allocated to Trump’s future presidential library, not paid to him “directly or indirectly”. (BBC)
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