Colbert’s finale draws a crowd

Most viewership since premiere, with a weird ending

The series finale of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert went out with a bang for CBS Thursday night – and in a manner you would not expect.

Looking at preliminary numbers, Colbert drew 6.74 million viewers from live plus same-day viewing, nearly tripling his season average (2.69 million) and the highest since his Sept. 8, 2015 premiere (6.55 million.) While that’s half the number from David Letterman’s final late show appearance on May 22, 2015, keep in mind the way viewership is measured has changed since then, as the show was also streamed live on Paramount Plus, and was DVRed by many viewers, including this writer, who was away Thursday night from home and watched the finale Friday afternoon. You can expect those numbers to rise (watch this space for updates.) 

The cancellation was announced last July, sparking outrage among fans and media observers, and took place three weeks before Skydance and CEO David Ellison took over CBS parent Paramount. CBS said it was due to high costs and a declining late-night audience base, but suspected it was due to President Trump’s dislike of the show, who is Colbert’s arch nemesis and nightly punching bag. 

As for the show itself, there were several cameos by stars in the audience, including Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd, Ryan Reynolds, and Tim Meadows, among others, each asking if they would ne his final guest. Well, we know how that turned out – but the final guest turned out to be former Beatle Paul McCartney (come on…did you REALLY think it was going to be Pope Leo XIV?), who made his first American TV appearance at the Ed Sullivan Theater in 1964 and returned to the same venue for Colbert’s final show, where performed the Beatles’ Hello Goodbye. Colbert did do a final monologue, Colbert did get a dig in at Staten Island (or as we say in Chicago, “Mount Greenwood”.)

However, things got weird toward the end of the show – with a science fiction twist.  Some kind of wormhole opened up backstage, swallowing Neil Degresse Tyson, and cameos from four other late-night talk show hosts – Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, John Oliver, and Seth Myers. After coming back out to the audience, Colbert, the band, and the audience – got sucked into the wormhole (yes, really!). I thought I would never see the day that a late-night show would use special effects. 

When the show returned from commercial break, Colbert jammed with former bandleader Jon Batiste, current bandleader Louis Cato, and Elvis Costello, singing his 1977 song Jump Up. Colbert said “good night” and segued back into the Ed Sullivan Theater with Paul McCartney to sing Goodbye. 

Colbert hit the switch backstage to end the series, which transformed the Ed Sullivan Theater into a snow globe, paying homage to St. Elsewhere’s controversial ending in May 1988 with Colbert’s dog sniffing about (thankfully, he didn’t meet the same fate as Mimsie The Cat did.) Throughout the entire 84-minute finale, there was no mention of President Trump.

On Friday, CBS replaced Colbert with Comics Unleashed with Byron Allen, in a pay-for-play move, which you can read more about here.

So what’s next for Stephen Colbert? Well, how about showing up in Monroe, Mich. the next day, guest-hosting a public-access cable TV talk show? Yes, it really happened, and it featured Jack White and Eminem: 

If Colbert wants to host a local access show here in Chicago – where he lived in the 1990s and got his comedy chops at Second City, he can swing by and create a small studio inside the 66-year-old Ford City Shopping Center on the Southwest Side. But he’d better hurry because sadly, the mall is closing for good June 22 and unlike the Ed Sullivan Theater being shrunken into a snow globe, Ford City is likely to meet the wrecking ball.