Stephen Colbert signs off from 'Late Show' after 11-year run

On a spring evening in 2026, Stephen Colbert took his final seat behind the Late Show desk at the Ed Sullivan Theater, closing a thirty-three-year chapter in American broadcast television that had begun with David Letterman in 1993. CBS framed the end in purely financial terms, a candid acknowledgment that the economics of gathering a mass audience at a fixed hour each night had become untenable in an age of streaming and fragmented attention. The cancellation is less an ending than a reckoning — a moment when an institution built for one era of media finally met the reality of another.