Colbert exits late night on defiantly joyful note

Well, hello there … remember me? I’m the guy who used to be the guy who got paid to watch television and then write about it in these pages. I’ve been gone for a while — I left the TV beat about a decade ago and, after spending the last six years of my career as editor of the Free Press’s perspectives/political commentary pages, retired in 2022.

I still love watching TV, and am reminded every day, as I flip through the channels, sample what’s new on the streaming services and generally peruse the pop-culture landscape, what a unique privilege it was to draw a paycheque for doing what most people do for fun, and at a cost. As good gigs go, being the Free Press’s TV critic was most definitely one of the best.

And last week’s news cycle included an event that converged the two subject areas that defined my Free Press years — entertainment and politics — in a way that prompted me ask Arts & Life editor Jill Wilson to let me dust off the ol’ Watching TV logo and offer a few thoughts.

I’m speaking, of course, about the final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, which aired last Thursday, bringing a defiantly joyful end to one of TV’s late-night institutions after an 11-year run with the former Colbert Report star as its host (the show’s creator and original host, David Letterman, retired in 2015 after 22 years at its helm).

CBS had announced last July that it was cancelling The Late Show at the end of this season and that the move was “purely a financial decision” because the program, despite being TV’s top-rated after-hours talk show, was a money-loser for the network.

The timing and optics of the cancellation suggested there was more at play than ratings and revenue lines, however, and that notoriously thin-skinned U.S. President Donald Trump’s seething dislike for the late-night hosts — including Colbert — who frequently ridicule his administration’s outrageous antics may have been a factor in CBS’s decision.

The network’s parent company, Paramount Global, was pursuing a multi-billion-dollar merger deal requiring regulatory approval from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and, in a move clearly intended to court the president’s (and, by extension, the newly politicized FCC’s) approval, had offered a $16 billion “donation” to Trump’s future presidential library in order to settle a lawsuit he had filed against CBS’s 60 Minutes over the way it edited a 2024 interview with then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris.

After the settlement was announced, Colbert described it on-air as “a big fat bribe.” Three days later, CBS issued the notice of The Late Show’s cancellation; one week after that, the FCC approved the merger of Paramount Global and Skydance Media.

With the fate of his show sealed, Colbert approached its final season with a no-holds-barred attitude, using his nightly monologues to lambaste Trump and lampoon CBS on a regular basis.

As The Late Show’s final weeks counted down, Colbert’s opening segments took on a more reflective and celebratory air, and last week’s lineup demonstrated the host’s determination to go out on the highest note possible.

Having scheduled final visits from Daily Show host Jon Stewart and film director Steven Spielberg on Tuesday and a star-studded roster of famous friends — including Robert De Niro, Martha Stewart, Billy Crystal, Josh Brolin, Mark Hamill, Jeff Daniels, Ben Stiller, Amy Sedaris, James Taylor, and “Weird Al” Yankovic — to administer one last “Colbert Questionert” on Wednesday, speculation abounded about who the show’s final guest would be.

The finale opened with a series of cameos from stars — led by Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd, Tig Notaro and Ryan Reynolds — whom Colbert had to tell they weren’t going to be the final guest, before the actual last guest walked onstage to thunderous applause.

The choice, as it turned out, couldn’t have been more appropriate — former Beatle Paul McCartney, whom music-minded Colbert rightly reveres and who famously performed (with bandmates John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr) on The Late Show’s stage back in 1964 when it was the home of TV’s most legendary talent showcase, The Ed Sullivan Show.

Colbert’s conversation with the music legend wasn’t particularly insightful, but it created a fitting full-circle moment before the Ed Sullivan Theatre’s final fade-to-black and set the stage for a beautifully concocted musical flourish, starting with a dream-sequence singalong featuring Colbert, Elvis Costello, original bandleader Jon Batiste and successor Louis Cato (doing an acoustic rendition of an obscure B-side song called Jump Up) and concluding with a McCartney-led performance of the Beatles’ Hello Goodbye before the host and his final guest shut the lights off for good.

Having The Late Show come to an end obviously wasn’t what Colbert — or the show’s still-faithful following — would have wanted, but all it took was one look at the host’s face during those closing musical sequences to prove he wasn’t going to let the Trump-meddling-induced termination rob him of the overwhelming joy he derived from doing the show.

Instead, Colbert turned his final musical moments in late-night network television into a master class in “Illegitimi non carborundum” — the oft-invoked mock-Latin maxim that implores, “Don’t let the bastards grind you down.”

When Colbert exited, he did so smiling.

As will I, as I now return to my regularly scheduled retirement. Thanks for reading, and for continuing to support the vital work of local news.

arts@freepress.mb.ca