Nine months after Stephen Colbert announced the cancellation of the long-running Late Show, he presided over the final episode of the CBS late night show, with Paul McCartney serving as his final guest after, Colbert joked, his “white whale” guest of the pope “canceled,” disappointed with the hot dogs offered in his dressing room.
At the top of his monologue, the host said originally the Late Show team had planned to do a “huge special” for the final episode, but then they realized that “every episode is special.”
“The best way to celebrate is to do a normal show and talk about the national conversation,” Colbert said.
With that, the host launched into a news-focused monologue, frequently interrupted by star cameos from the audience, including from Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd and Tim Meadows.
Unexpectedly, though the monologue was remarkably light on politics for a show that’s become known for its cutting comedy about President Donald Trump and other political figures.
In fact, Trump himself wasn’t even mentioned by name in the final Late Show, including in the monologue.
The closest Colbert came to mentioning the president was when he and McCartney were talking and McCartney recalled how the makeup artists at the Ed Sullivan Show put so much makeup on that they looked “bright orange,” the Beatles star said.
“That’s very popular in certain circles,” Colbert said, before joking “that’s where it started.”
McCartney took the stage after a running bit throughout the monologue and an installment of The Late Show‘s signature “news you missed” segment, “Meanwhile,” of stars in the audience thinking they’d be Colbert’s final guest, including Ryan Reynolds.
Colbert then began to introduce his “infallible” final guest, the pope, who he’s long said he was still desperate to have on the show. However, Colbert was told by one of his crewmembers, the pope was refusing to come out of his dressing room because they got him the wrong snacks.
With that, the show cut to the outside of a dressing room door as an arm draped in papal vestments threw hot dogs out into the hallway, insisting he wouldn’t take the stage.
“Oh no, the pope, who was definitely my guest tonight, has canceled,” Colbert said.
McCartney then walked out, saying, “What about me?”
“I was just in the area and I was doing some errands,” the musician said as he gifted Colbert with a framed photo of the Beatles performing on The Ed Sullivan Show.
The two settled in for an interview but after a couple of segments of conversation, Colbert stepped away to address the “technical difficulties” plaguing the show up until that point as the sound and visual display around him kept glitching.
As he walked backstage, he saw a giant “interdimensional wormhole,” as he was informed by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who showed up in yet another cameo.
“Two contradictory realities cannot co-exist without rupturing the space-time continuum,” Tyson said. “For instance, if a show is No. 1 in late night but also gets canceled. … Your cancellation created a rift in the comedy-variety talk continuum, and if it grows all of late night television could be destroyed.”
With that, Tyson was swallowed up in the wormhole, but Colbert was soon joined by his fellow late night hosts — Jon Stewart and the Strike Force Five team of John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon — for some sage advice.
“The hole’s here; you can’t ignore it,” Stewart said, arguing that the real question is “how you choose to walk through it,” suggesting that Colbert persevere in the face of darkness.
Oliver added, “Sometime this may come for all of our shows.” But though it looks like the end, there’s no need to despair, Colbert concluded. As the Strike Force Five team reminded him, he didn’t stop doing his show after the 2016 election or during the COVID-19 pandemic. So the hosts temporarily banished the wormhole.
But alas when Colbert returned to the stage, so did the wormhole, this time at the top of the Ed Sullivan theater, sucking up the studio, his audience, band leader Louis Cato and Colbert himself.
And that wasn’t the end of the wormhole. After Colbert joined Elvis Costello and Jon Batiste for a performance of “Jump Up,” McCartney took the stage with Colbert and the Late Show band to perform the Beatles’ “Hello, Goodbye.” Then, McCartney turned off the lights at the Ed Sullivan Theater and the wormhole sucked up the whole building, leaving just a small replica of it in a snow globe, playing the Late Show theme song, on the New York City sidewalk. Colbert’s dog, Benny, sniffed around it as Colbert could be heard off camera saying, “Come on, Benny.”
The episode opened with Colbert sharing a message to his audience both in the Ed Sullivan Theater and at home.
“This show has been a joy for us to do for you. In fact, we call this show the joy machine,” he said. “Because to do this many shows, it has to be a machine. But the thing is if you choose to do it with joy, it doesn’t hurt as much when your fingers get caught in the gears.”
He praised his staffers and their strong bonds as well as the support and energy of the audience, connecting his relationship with them all the way back to the first episode of The Colbert Report in 2005.
Introducing the concept of “truthiness” that night, he vowed to “feel the news at you.” Moving over to The Late Show, Colbert said he and his team realized their job was different on CBS.
“We were here to feel the news with you. I don’t know about you but I sure have felt it,” he said. “We love doing this show for you, but what we really love is doing this show with you.”
In July, Colbert announced that CBS had decided to cancel The Late Show after its 2025-2026 season.
Despite CBS’ claim that the cancellation was a “purely financial decision” amid a challenging linear TV environment, with parent company Paramount adding that the move was “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters,” there’s been widespread speculation about possible other reasons for the end of The Late Show.
Colbert has been a prominent critic of President Trump and, just days before news broke of the Late Show‘s end, Colbert criticized CBS parent company Paramount’s controversial $16 million settlement of a lawsuit filed by Trump over a 60 Minutes interview with his 2024 election opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris.
Over the summer, Trump celebrated the news of the Late Show cancellation on his Truth Social platform.
“I absolutely love that Colbert got fired,” the president wrote the day after the cancellation was announced. “His talent was even less than his ratings. I hear Jimmy Kimmel is next.”
Less than two months after Colbert announced the Late Show was being canceled, the series won the best talk show Emmy.
In that speech, Colbert said that while he had initially set out to make a late night show about love, he later realized “we were doing a late night comedy show about loss. That’s related to love, because sometimes you only truly know how much you love something when you get a sense you might be losing it. Ten years later, in September 2025, my friends, I have never loved my country more desperately. God bless America. Stay strong, be brave, and if the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy and punch a higher floor.”
And Colbert has addressed the speculation of there being an “another reason” for his exit.
“There is a reason why people believe that — the network had clearly already done it once by cutting that $16 million check [to the Trump administration],” Colbert told The Hollywood Reporter in a recent exit interview cover story. “Me being canceled reinforced a narrative that CBS already had a nimbus of knee-bending that they had created around themselves, because even their lawyers said there was no reason to cut the check, and then they did and gave no rationale for why they changed their minds, and then suddenly they got their broadcast license.”
As for the reports that The Late Show was losing $40 million a year, which Colbert has joked about, he told THR that figure “came as a surprise.”
Colbert’s next endeavor is taking the avid J.R.R. Tolkien fan to Middle-earth as he co-writes an upcoming installment of the Lord of the Rings franchise. Beyond that, the host has insisted he wanted to remain focused on finishing out The Late Show to the best of his ability before he considered other future moves. Still, he told Meyers in January that he and his longtime collaborators, many of whom work with him at The Late Show, will “do something else together.”
And Colbert recently told THR he began fielding scripts immediately after he announced the end of The Late Show and that he could see “creating another show” and still has the desire to perform.
“Got to stay in front of the lens, baby,” he joked.
Shortly after The Late Show wraps, though, Colbert and his family, all of whom were at the Ed Sullivan Theater for his final episode, will head down to D.C. for his brother’s wedding. He celebrated his son’s college graduation this past Monday as well.
