Stephen Colbert Admits CBS Might Have ‘Saved’ His Life With ‘Late Show’ Cancellation
Stephen Colbert’s time hosting The Late Show on CBS will come to an end on May 21. The network canceled the show in 2025 in what they described as a financial decision. Despite this, it has faced much criticism, with many believing that the decision was politically motivated. Colbert said he is grateful for the chance to host the historic show, but he said he is looking forward to his next chapter.
Stephen Colbert spoke about the end of ‘The Late Show’
Colbert has hosted The Late Show for over a decade. He said that news of the show’s cancellation shocked him. Still, he’s grateful for his years hosting it.
“I tried never to take for granted filming in the Ed Sullivan Broadway theater, having that tremendous audience, or having the ability to work with the funniest people I know every day and make jokes about the things that make me most anxious,” he told People.
In the months after the cancellation, he now wonders if CBS “saved my life” because “it takes a lot of bone marrow to do the show every day, and now I’ll be stepping down with enough time, enough energy to do other things that I want to do.”
He said that it takes a great deal of time and energy to host the show. He looks forward to what he’ll be able to do next.
“The show’s like a flaming toboggan ride every day and the trick is to not hit any trees on your way down the mountain before 12:30,” he said. “There’s so much to think about to do the show. So I don’t have much better of an answer than most college seniors do, which is I’ve got to finish this first, because it takes almost the entirety of my brain to do this show. So we’ll land this plane and we’ll check out the view from there.”
CBS said the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s show was a ‘financial’ decision
In 2025, Paramount, CBS’s parent company, settled a lawsuit with Donald Trump over the editing of a 2024 interview with Kamala Harris. The company was on the verge of a merger with Skydance Media, which required the Trump administration’s approval.
“I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles: it’s ‘big, fat bribe,’ ” Colbert said on The Late Show.
Just three days later, Colbert announced that his show would be ending in 2026. This led to public outcry, including questions from politicians. Trump celebrated the decision on social media.
CBS said that the cancellation was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night.” They also claimed that the ending was “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.”
They praised Colbert and said that the network will miss him.
He is working on a new ‘Lord of the Rings’ project
Colbert and his son have collaborated on a new Lord of the Rings film. The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past will take place 14 years after the passing of Frodo Baggins. Colbert is a superfan of the series.
“You know what the books mean to me, and what your films mean to me,” Colbert told director Peter Jackson (per AP). “But the thing I found myself reading over and over again were the six chapters early on in (The Fellowship of the Ring) that y’all never developed into the first movie back in the day. I thought: ‘Oh, wait, maybe that could be its own story that could fit into the larger story. Could we make something that was completely faithful to the books while also being completely faithful to the movies that you guys had already made?’”
Jackson has described Colbert as the biggest fan of the series that he has ever met.
