Stephen Colbert Ends The Late Show With Stephen Colbert Thursday — The Colbert Report
Stephen Colbert’s the colbert report era on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert ends Thursday, closing a run that began in 2015 and carries the CBS franchise past more than 30 years on air. CBS said last year that the show would end for purely financial reasons, and the Los Angeles Times is using the final stretch to revisit 10 memorable moments from the series.
2015 to Thursday
Colbert took over in 2015, and the show’s final episode now lands after a long run that helped define CBS’s late-night presence. The end date gives the network a clean break, but it also leaves one of broadcast television’s most durable properties without its current host.
That shift matters because Colbert is not just wrapping a television job; he is also co-writing the script for the next Lord of the Rings movie. For viewers who followed him through the CBS years, Thursday is the point where the show stops being a nightly fixture and becomes a finished archive.
Obama, Stewart, and Letterman
Former President Barack Obama appeared in the final weeks, alongside Strike Force Five, Jon Stewart, Sally Field, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and David Letterman. The guest list reads like a compressed history of Colbert’s late-night orbit, with peers and recurring figures returning as the series wound down.
David Letterman’s appearance carries particular weight because he once hosted the franchise that Colbert later inherited. Bringing back a former host, plus Stewart and the other late-night names, made the closing stretch feel less like a farewell tour than a formal handoff from one era of television to another.
Nick Cave and Garfield
Nick Cave appeared with the Bad Seeds in 2017, then returned to talk about Wild God and Faith, Hope, and Carnage. Colbert called that conversation “extraordinary,” a rare adjective that fit because Cave showed the show could still book musicians for more than a quick performance slot.
Andrew Garfield also appeared during the show’s seventh season to promote Tick, Tick... Boom!, discuss his preparation for Jonathan Larson, and speak about grief after the recent passing of his mother. Garfield described that grief as “unexpressed love,” and Keanu Reeves answered Colbert’s question with, “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.”
Those moments are the useful measure of the series as it ends Thursday: not just celebrity drop-ins, but interviews that gave Colbert room to slow late-night television down when the format usually pushes it faster.
