The Late Show

The Late Show always felt like adulthood to me.

Growing up, I heard about David Letterman before I was old enough to stay up late enough to watch The Late Show. One of the local radio stations syndicated Letterman’s Top 10 List bit, and on the days where I didn’t take the bus to school, depending on what time my Dad would drive me into school, we’d hear it in the car on the way in. My uncle would also occasionally reference the show, particularly during the second term of George W. Bush. I’d see ads for it when watching TV with my family, haunting me as the out-of-reach show that I could one day watch once I was a grown-up without a bedtime.

As I got older, I remember staying up and watching Letterman with Dad because Obama was the guest, during his 2008 campaign. Senior year of high school I’d often stay up late on Fridays to play video games and watch Letterman.

In undergrad, I had access to cable television for the first time¹. Like many millennials in the early 2010s, I became a Daily Show (and Colbert Report) person. The Daily Show was also one of the first shows to offer episodes available online for free, which made it much easier to watch with my roommates². It was something consistent during a time where we were all changing and learning how to grow up.

The Colbert Report ended in late 2014, my first semester in grad school. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart ended the following year, before relaunching with Trevor Noah. By then, I was watching both shows less, but I streamed their final episodes with a friend. I remember being sad, but I hadn’t watched the shows since moving out of the five-person garbage house I lived in during undergrad.

Letterman also ended in 2015. Letterman was not widely available on streaming. I wanted to watch the last episode, which aired on a Thursday. It seemed like I was the only person in my age group who cared. I signed up for an extremely early version of CBS All Access³ for around $25/month. The service couldn’t handle the load, and I watched about 10 minutes of a laggy, pixelated monologue before I gave up. I then forgot to cancel CBS All Access for another five months. At the time, as a poor grad student, the extra $25/month was huge. Many years later I would finally watch the entirety of Letterman’s final episode as a series of segments on YouTube, as content owners finally figured out how to leverage streaming effectively.

I watched the first episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert the following Fall. My roommate was in Korea for some conference. I remember watching it by myself, wondering how the character from The Colbert Report would translate to The Late Show. It had a rough first year, but the theme from Jon Batiste was top-tier.

By the end of 2017, many of my closest friends from grad school had moved on from Ann Arbor. My evening routine became falling asleep to The Late Show with Colbert, recorded via YouTube TV. This was before YouTube TV was widely available as an app on TVs themselves. I had a Google Home mini that allowed me to voice control my Chromecast. I had the Late Show set to record, and I would usually start watching it slightly after it began airing. I knew exactly how long the first commercial breaks were (four minutes after the monologue, then two and a half minutes before the first interview). I’d lay in bed and yell at the Google Home, half asleep, to skip ahead the correct number of minutes as the commercial breaks began. It was a rough couple years for me. Colbert made it better.

In 2018, I remember talking with two friends of mine who said that no one under the age of 40 watched network late night TV. I was the odd one out, watching Colbert consistently in my late 20s. Colbert had the self-righteous style left-leaning comedy that was everywhere in the 2010s. Some of it may seem cringe now. At the time, it was the culture, even though it was more common for men in their 20s to watch John Oliver instead.

I watched Colbert record episodes of The Late Show from his home during most of the pandemic. I remember his first episode back in the studio once vaccines were available, and the first episode with a live audience again after New York City lifted restrictions on gatherings.

I started watching Colbert less once the pandemic ended, and even less again once Trump was reelected. The 2010s style of comedy now did seem a bit dated. I didn’t want to go back to how I felt in the 2010s. I would still watch the occasional Colbert interview and monologue on YouTube.

The last episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert aired last month, May 2026. Perhaps enough other people had the same reaction as me, and stopped watching. Late night television simply does not have the cultural power that it had in the 2000s, let alone the 90s. 55M people watched the last episode of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. 14M watched the last episode of Letterman. Only 7M watched the last episode of Colbert, although another 5M watched it on YouTube in the week following.

On one of the final episodes, Bruce Springsteen said that Colbert lost his show because Trump can’t take a joke, and the Ellisons want to suck up to Trump. There is truth to that statement. Somehow the other late night shows (with worse ratings!) have found a way to stay on the air. At the same time, it’s clear the reach of these shows are not what they once were.

The Ed Sullivan Theater is where the Beatles first played live on TV in the US. It felt fitting that Colbert ended with Paul McCartney as his final guest. I never made it out to watch a taping of the show at the Ed Sullivan Theater itself. I find myself disappointed that CBS seems to be doing nothing with the theater.

The politics are part of the story, but they’re not the part that speaks to me the most. I’m sad the show is over. When I was in high school, I remember reading that one of the reasons Letterman was such a valuable TV property was because he had reach to men in their late 20s and early 30s in a way that many other weeknight shows did not. It seems the audiences aged with the show. I’m in my 30s now, and I appear to be one of the youngest people who watched or cared about the actual last episode of Colbert, as opposed to only the political statement of it all. I haven’t talked to anyone under the age of 50 who watched the last episode live. It’s funny, in middle school, being able to watch the Late Show felt like growing up. And yet, as I actually got older and grew up, somehow the audience of the show was always still just a little bit older than me.

I bought two mugs last week. The Late Show is not the cultural touchstone it once was. Over the last three decades, I grew up, but the show aged.