Final Episode of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" (Spartina, Paramount Skydance, CBS-TV, aired May 21, 2026)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, May 21) my husband Charles and I watched the last episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. In case you were wondering whether Colbert would use his final show to open up on Donald Trump with all guns blazing, think again: it was actually a low-keyed affair aimed more at thanking his staff and his audience than scoring any last-minute political points. Not that that saved him from Trump’s wrath. In an interview on Wednesday, May 20 Trump made an ominous statement: “I'll have a message at a later date.” The later date came in the wee hours of May 22 just after Colbert’s last show came to an inspiring end. Trump issued a tweet on Truth Social (“Lies Social,” the site should be called) that read, “Colbert is finally finished at CBS. Amazing that he lasted so long! No talent, no ratings, no life. He was like a dead person. You could take any person off of the street and they would be better than this total jerk. Thank goodness he’s finally gone!” Colbert’s final show began with the title “Hello Goodbye,” and he built up suspense as to who his last interviewee would be. He had various celebrities in his audience, including Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd, Tim Meadows (a Black comedian Colbert worked with in Chicago at the fabled Second City improv troupe), Tig Notaro, and Ryan Reynolds, all pretending to assume that they would have the Colbert’s-last-guest honor. They also did a bit with an actor playing Pope Leo XIV angrily turning down the honor because His Holiness was dissatisfied with the hot dog they brought him.

The actual final interviewee was … Paul McCartney, who’d just done a guest shot on Saturday Night Live and therefore was still in New York. Mostly they talked about the history of the Ed Sullivan Theatre and how The Beatles made their U.S. debut there 62 years ago. Colbert also did a last “Meanwhile” segment (“Meanwhile,” with its collection of bizarre news stories from across America and the world, was always one of my favorite parts of Colbert’s program), only during both “Meanwhile” and Paul’s interview there were odd green flashes across the back of the stage. Later Colbert descended into the theatre’s basement and made the discovery that they were actually part of a wormhole in space that had opened up because of the disparity between Colbert’s ratings (he was leading the pack in late-night) and his cancellation. He even brought Neil de Grasse Tyson to explain the physics of this, and Tyson got sucked into the wormhole himself. (I said, “It serves you right for leading the campaign to de-list Pluto as a planet.”) The next segment introduced Jon Stewart, whose The Daily Show still survives even under the leadership of Trump groupies Larry and David Ellison, who took over CBS’s parent company and offered Trump Colbert’s head on the proverbial silver platter, and who mentored Colbert during his early years on the Comedy Central channel playing a pretend Right-winger for satire. It also brought on the other four members of “Strike Force Five,” the podcast Colbert and his fellow late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver started doing when the Writers’ Guild of America’s strike against the major film and TV studios prevented them from doing their shows.

The last episode concluded with a quite beautiful musical segment which brought on McCartney, Elvis Costello (working together for the first time since they got together in the late 1980’s for Costello’s album Spike and McCartney’s Flowers in the Dirt: in the wake of John Lennon’s death I had already decided that Costello would be the perfect person to take Lennon’s place in a reunited Beatles ¬– the glasses, the slightly nasal voice, the wordplay in his lyrics, the penchant for politically and socially conscious songs – and when he and Paul actually started writing together, I thought, “Dare we hope?”), Colbert’s former music director Jon Batiste, and his last one, Louis Cato. They did a new song called “Jump Up” and then Paul led the jam band on a cover of the Beatles’ classic “Hello Goodbye,” which had given the episode its title. While the band was playing Colbert’s wife, Evie McGee, came out with their three adult children, one of whom will be working with Colbert on his next project: writing the script for a new The Lord of the Rings movie. (I rather testily posted that information on Facebook and made a snotty comment to the effect that just about the last thing the world needs is another Lord of the Rings movie. The closest thing to a political comment all night came from Paul McCartney during the interview, when he named his native Britain as a country that’s still a democracy and added, “America is still a democracy, too … I hope.”

I guess Colbert figured he’d had his anti-Trump bases covered the night before, when he had Bruce Springsteen on his program as his last musical guest (I had thought from the way they’d announced his appearance that he'd do both an interview and a song, but the administration of “The Colbert Questionert” to Colbert himself ran so long it ate up the time for a Springsteen interview). Springsteen performed the angry political song “Streets of Minneapolis,” which he’d written to protest the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis by agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), respectively. He introduced it by saying, “I am here tonight in support of Stephen, because you’re the first guy in America who’s lost his show because we’ve got a president who can’t take a joke, and because Larry and David Ellison feel the need to kiss his ass to get what they want. Stephen, these are small-minded people who’ve got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about. This is for you.” That’s about as good an envoi as any for a TV program that’s been required viewing for both Charles and I for a decade now (ever since Trump got elected President in the first place) and a key element in enabling us to keep our sanity in the face of the madness of Trump’s AmeriKKKa (as we used to spell it in the 1960’s).