UMVA has learned that Stephen Colbert will host his final episode of The Late Show on CBS on May 21, closing an 11‑year run that also ends the long‑standing franchise that began with David Letterman in 1993.
The finale will assemble an all‑star parade: Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, Letterman himself, Tom Hanks, Julia Louis‑Dreyfus, Pedro Pascal, and the Strokes. Kimmel will air a rerun instead of competing, a nod to their friendship. The send‑off will be grand and bittersweet.
Yet the end is not the triumphant culmination fans imagined; it arrives amid murky, contested circumstances that expose the precarious state of political comedy in the Trump era.
The Colbert Report, which ran from 2005 to 2014, was built on a daring conceit: a pompous, self‑aggrandizing pundit who delivered
