‘We were lucky’: Stephen Colbert’s ‘Late Show’ bids farewell in final broadcast on CBS
By Brian Stelter, CNN
(CNN) — The series finale of “The Late Show” aired on CBS Thursday night, with Stephen Colbert giving thanks to his staff, studio audience and viewers.
Colbert walked out to deafening cheers from the studio audience inside the Ed Sullivan Theater.
“If you’re just tuning into ‘The Late Show,’ you missed a lot,” he quipped, alluding to CBS parent company Paramount’s controversial and politically charged decision to cancel the show.
When the host noted that Thursday night was the final broadcast and his fans booed, he put up his finger and said, “No, no, we were lucky enough to be here for the last 11 years. You can’t take this for granted.”
The monologue was interrupted by celebrity friends like Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd, and Tim Meadows, who all vied to be Colbert’s last guest. Ultimately it was Paul McCartney who sat down with Colbert for an in-depth interview.
Colbert made a few jokes about the circumstances; “A lot of people have been asking me what I plan to do after tonight, and the answer is drugs,” he joked.
But Colbert, true to self, also had some sincere things to say about his relationship with the late-night audience.
Colbert harkened back to the way he introduced himself as a blowhard character on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report” in 2005: “Anyone can read the news to you. I promise to feel the news ‘at’ you.”
Once he moved from Comedy Central to the much bigger CBS stage in 2015, “I realized pretty soon … that our job over here was different,” he said. “We were here to feel the news with you. And I don’t know about you, but I sure have felt it.”
After Colbert and his producers taped the final episode on Thursday evening, they headed to a star-studded wrap party nearby.
Colbert has said in interviews that he hasn’t had much time to think ahead to what he might want to do next.
“I don’t have much better of an answer than most college seniors do, which is I’ve got to finish this first, because it takes almost the entirety of my brain to do this show,” he told People magazine. “So we’ll land this plane and we’ll check out the view from there.”
Starting Friday, the 11:35 p.m. window belonging to “The Late Show” will be controlled by Byron Allen, whose media company leased the time slot from CBS for his show “Comics Unleashed.”
Allen’s talk show features a rotating roundtable of comics who tell stories and riff on each other’s jokes, and it’s purposefully evergreen in nature so that the episodes can be repeated later, which means it noticeably lacks any political humor.
CBS said Colbert’s set will be donated to the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago.
As for the famed Ed Sullivan Theater stage where the show was produced for decades, there are no firm plans for what will become of the 100-year-old performance space.
“The fact that nothing’s gonna come in here breaks my heart,” Colbert told Architectural Digest in a video tour of the theater. “But someone will figure it out, and I wish them all the luck in the world — because they’re gonna love it.”
This story has been updated with additional information.
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