Stephen Colbert's 'Late Show' canceled by CBS, ends May 2026
By ALICIA RANCILIO and ANDREW DALTON
CBS is canceling 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert' next May, shuttering a decades-old TV institution in a changing media landscape and removing from air one of President Donald Trump's most prominent and persistent late-night critics.
Thursday's announcement followed Colbert's criticism on Monday of a settlement between Trump and Paramount Global, parent company of CBS, over a '60 Minutes' story.
Colbert told his audience at New York's Ed Sullivan Theater that he had learned Wednesday night that after a decade on air, 'next year will be our last season. ... It's the end of 'The Late Show' on CBS. I'm not being replaced. This is all just going away.'
The audience responded with boos and groans.
'Yeah, I share your feelings," the 61-year-old comic said.
Three top Paramount and CBS executives praised Colbert's show as 'a staple of the nation's zeitgeist' in a statement that said the cancellation 'is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show's performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.'
In his Monday monologue, Colbert said he was "offended" by the $16 million settlement reached by Paramount, whose pending sale to Skydance Media needs the Trump administration's approval. He said the technical name in legal circles for the deal was 'big fat bribe.'
'I don't know if anything — anything — will repair my trust in this company," Colbert said. "But, just taking a stab at it, I'd say $16 million would help.'
Trump had sued Paramount Global over how '60 Minutes' edited its interview last fall with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Critics say the company settled primarily to clear a hurdle to the Skydance sale.
Colbert took over 'The Late Show' in 2015 after becoming a big name in comedy and news satire working with Jon Stewart on 'The Daily Show" and hosting 'The Colbert Report," which riffed on right-wing talk shows.
The most recent ratings from Nielsen show Colbert gaining viewers so far this year and winning his time slot among broadcasters, with about 2.417 million viewers across 41 new episodes. On Tuesday, Colbert's 'Late Show' landed its sixth nomination for a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding talk show. It won a Peabody Award in 2021.
David Letterman began hosting 'The Late Show" in 1993. When Colbert took over, he deepened its engagement with politics. Alongside musicians and movie stars, Colbert often welcomes politicians to his couch.
Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California was a guest on Thursday night. Schiff said on X that 'if Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better.'
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, released a similar statement, saying "America deserves to know if his show was canceled for political reasons.'
Colbert's late-night host counterpart on ABC, Jimmy Kimmel, shared Colbert's announcement on Instagram along with the message: 'Love you Stephen." He then directed an expletive at CBS.
Colbert has targeted Trump for years. The guests on his very first show in September 2015 were actor George Clooney and Jeb Bush, who was then struggling in his Republican presidential primary campaign against Trump.
'Gov. Bush was the governor of Florida for eight years,' Colbert told his audience. 'And you would think that that much exposure to oranges and crazy people would have prepared him for Donald Trump. Evidently not.'
Late-night TV has been facing economic pressures for years; viewership is down and many young viewers prefer highlights online, which networks have trouble monetizing. CBS also recently canceled host Taylor Tomlinson's 'After Midnight,' which aired after 'The Late Show.'
While NBC has acknowledged economic pressures by eliminating the band on Seth Meyers' show and cutting one night of Jimmy Fallon's 'The Tonight Show," there had been no such visible efforts at 'The Late Show."
Colbert's relentless criticism of Trump, his denunciation of the settlement, and the parent company's pending sale can't be ignored, said Bill Carter, author of 'The Late Shift."
'If CBS thinks people are just going to swallow this, they're really deluded,' Carter said.
AP Media Writer David Bauder contributed from New York.
© Copyright 2025 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.
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House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) sent the House home a day early because business had ground to a halt over the Epstein issue. He was responding to Republicans on the House Rules Committee who were uncomfortable taking repeated votes on language introduced by Democrats to release the files. His solution was to allow the panel to approve a nonbinding resolution asking for the files to be released within 30 days; that resolution doesn't have the force of law, however, and may never come up for a vote. Johnson insisted Wednesday there was 'no daylight' between Republicans and Trump on the issue and said a vote in the House would be premature because the president had directed Bondi to seek permission from the courts to release grand jury material. (This was before the Florida judge's decision.) 'There's no point in passing a resolution to urge the administration to do something they are already doing, and so that's why we're going to let that process play out,' he said. 'This is not out of fear in any way. What we're trying to do is maximize the transparency. And we want every single person who's involved in any way in the Epstein evils to be called to swift justice.' The speaker also argued that Republicans had a 'legal' and 'moral' responsibility to protect the names of Epstein's victims from surfacing in the media, and excoriated Democrats for playing politics on the issue. 'The way Democrats have tried to weaponize this issue is absolutely shameless, and I just want to say this: Democrats said nothing and did nothing, absolutely nothing about bringing transparency for the entire four years of the Biden presidency,' Johnson said. Jeffries, alongside minority whip Katherine Clark (D-Massachusetts) and Democratic caucus chairman Pete Aguilar (D-California), argued that there's a connection between Epstein and other Republican policy priorities, including Trump's tax and immigration bill. 'The Epstein case has helped their own base see what's going on: that this is a con job and that they were never the center of the work that they are going to do here,' Clark said. Democrats out on the campaign trail are listening. Alissa Ellman, a Democrat challenging Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney, is holding coffees in her Upstate New York district and holding town halls to discuss what she says has been a top concern of voters: Epstein. And in a Wisconsin swing district, Democrat Rebecca Cooke has been hammering GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden as complicit in failing to prosecute 'elite and powerful pedophiles.' 'This isn't about a list, it's about criminal prosecution to the full extent of the law,' Cooke said. 'Every patriot in this country knows what real justice looks like, and Republicans in Congress will pay a price for protecting these criminals and rewarding these same people with massive tax breaks.' The aggressive Democratic rhetoric is a departure from Democrats' typical refusal to engage in pushing back on or even entertaining conspiracy theories from the MAGA base. Several House Democrats began daring Trump to release the Epstein files on social media this month. Rep. Jimmy Gomez (California) was one of the first Democratic lawmakers to demand the administration release the Epstein files because he noticed the matter trending online in right-wing circles. Other liberal lawmakers began pushing the issue, and the leadership listened as Democrats sought more forceful ways to respond to Trump. 'He said he was going to drain the swamp, and then he became the swamp,' Gomez said of Trump.
