The Late Show with Stephen Colbert takes its final bow
The Excerpt
USA TODAY
4.1 • 1.2K Ratings
🗓️ 18 May 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
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Summary
For decades, late‑night television has provided us with a shared end‑of‑day ritual made up of monologues and jokes that shape our political conversations. And, while Stephen Colbert didn’t invent late-night TV, he sharpened it. Last July, when Colbert announced the end of The Late Show franchise on CBS, many wondered what happens when shows that function as cultural town squares begin to disappear. USA TODAY TV Critic Kelly Lawler joins The Excerpt to discuss rising production costs, shifts in viewing preferences and the demise of one of the pillars of late-night television.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | For decades, late-night television has provided us with a shared end-of-the-day ritual, made up of monologues and jokes that shape our political conversations. |
| 0:14.0 | Well, Stephen Colbert didn't invent late-night TV. He sharpened it. |
| 0:18.0 | Last July, when Colbert announced the end of the late show franchise on CBS, |
| 0:24.0 | many wondered what happens when shows that function as cultural town squares begin to disappear. |
| 0:34.5 | Hello and welcome to USA Today's The Excerpt. I'm Dana Taylor. Today is Monday, May 18th, |
| 0:40.3 | 2026. Joining me to discuss rising production costs, shifts, and viewing preferences, and the |
| 0:47.3 | demise of one of the pillars of late-night television is USA Today TV critic Kelly Lawler. It's good to have you here, Kelly. Thank you so much for having me. |
| 0:57.0 | Kelly, this might seem like a strange question following his more than a decade as host of the late show. But who is Stephen Colbert? |
| 1:06.0 | Yeah, I mean, Stephen Colbert is one of the biggest names in American comedy. He got his start in improv, |
| 1:13.8 | along with a lot of other comedians in Gen X, who are household names like A.B. Polar and a lot of |
| 1:21.5 | people from S&L. And he first came to real national attention as a correspondent on the Daily Show when John |
| 1:28.5 | Stewart was the host full time in the early 2000s. |
| 1:33.0 | And he had a character and that character was very influenced by the politics of the time |
| 1:38.7 | by the George W. Bush era Republican Party. |
| 1:43.4 | And that character was named Stephen Colbert, but it wasn't the man himself. |
| 1:47.5 | And he was so popular satirizing the conservative right at the time that he was eventually |
| 1:53.5 | given his own show on Comedy Central, the Colbert rapport, not report. |
| 1:58.2 | And that was followed John Stewart, the two kind of marched together in this like |
| 2:04.4 | heyday of Comedy Central late night television. When David Letterman decided in 2015 that he was going |
| 2:10.1 | to retire from the late show, CBS picked Colbert, who was already in the CBS family Comedy Central |
| 2:17.0 | and CBS were have been owned by the same |
| 2:20.0 | parent company for a long time. And, you know, he's been reinvented on the late show as |
... |
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