Stephen Colbert ends Late Show run with surprise guest parade

Stephen Colbert’s final Late Show turned the Ed Sullivan Theater into a late-night reunion, stretching 17 minutes beyond the usual hour and drawing a surprise parade of the genre’s biggest names. Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers and John Oliver all appeared, joined by Jon Stewart, Tig Notaro, Ryan Reynolds, Paul Rudd, Bryan Cranston, Don Cheadle and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, as Colbert closed out an 11-year CBS run that ended after more than 1,800 episodes.

The broadcast on May 21, 2026, also marked the end of The Late Show as a franchise after 33 years. CBS announced in July 2025 that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert would air its final episode in May and that the network would retire the brand at the end of the season. That decision gave the farewell a fixed horizon, but the last night still landed like a live summation of the late-night ecosystem Colbert helped define.

What made the evening feel bigger than one host was the way it used familiar television formality to project continuity at a moment of change. The suit remains one of late night’s most efficient visual signals: it says authority, normalcy and institutional polish even when hosts use it to deliver irony or political bite. At the Ed Sullivan Theater, that symbolism carries extra weight. The room at Broadway and 53rd Street is tied not only to Ed Sullivan’s variety-era stage but also to David Letterman’s long tenure there before Colbert inherited the desk. The building itself has become part of the argument that late-night television is still a civic institution, not just a comedy slot.

Colbert underscored that legacy in his farewell monologue, saying he and his staff had been lucky to be part of the theater’s history and stressing the joy the show generated over the course of its long run. The final musical guest was Paul McCartney, a deliberate nod to the room’s history: The Beatles made their American television debut there on Feb. 9, 1964, and McCartney had also appeared on Letterman’s show in 2009.

The farewell also highlighted how much late night has narrowed while remaining symbolically potent. Kimmel and Fallon aired reruns in Colbert’s time slot on Thursday, and the hosts’ appearance on the final broadcast showed a fraternity pulling together as the form loses scale. CBS had already returned Colbert to the theater in June 2021 with a full, fully vaccinated audience, saying it was the first network late-night show to do so after more than a year and 205 episodes without a live crowd. Five years later, the same room became the stage for a sign-off that looked backward at television tradition and forward to a late-night landscape where the suit still matters, even as the institutions behind it shrink.