What happened
Stephen Colbert on Thursday night hosted the final CBS “Late Show,” nearly 33 years after David Letterman launched the franchise. Paramount canceled the top-rated late-night show last year while seeking approval for a merger from the Trump administration. But “despite all the controversy, Colbert chose to go out on a joyful, celebratory note, with help from Paul McCartney” and other celebrity guests, USA Today said.
Who said what
“We were lucky enough to be here for the last 11 years,” Colbert told his audience when they booed his reminder it was the final episode. He closed the show with his fellow late-night hosts, beside an “interdimensional wormhole” threatening to swallow all of late-night TV. The premature death of Colbert’s show isn’t exactly “‘the death of late night’ — that funeral has been going on for decades,” James Poniewozik said at The New York Times. But it “feels like the end of a cultural era,” or “actually, two eras”: His “Colbert Report” skillfully “parodied politics,” and his “Late Show” unspooled through a “time when politics became a parody of itself.”
What next?
“The Late Show” is being replaced, starting Friday, with Byron Allen’s “Comics Unleashed,” which “features a rotating roundtable of comics” and is “purposefully evergreen in nature,” CNN said, meaning it “noticeably lacks any political humor.”
Paul McCartney appeared as a surprise final guest
