The Colbert Retirement: Inside the Final Week of the Man Who Satired a Nation

The Ed Sullivan Theater’s lights still come on slowly, warmly, and expectantly as they have for ten years, but the space around them has changed. These last few weeks, there’s an odd weight in the building.

It’s evident in how long the audience stays after the warm-up comic ends and how they applaud for a beat too long when Stephen Colbert leaves, as though each applause serves as a thank-you. An ordinary late-night studio has become more akin to a wake with a band as May 21 approaches.

Colbert might not have anticipated this level of sentiment. He’s the type of host who has always seemed a little wary of his own fame, sidestepping compliments with a quick joke or a hymn from his time as a Catholic schoolboy. However, the farewell has gotten out of control. Recently, John Lithgow, of all people, took the stage and read a poem that referred to him as a “beloved national treasure.” There’s a feeling that the attendees aren’t merely endorsing films. They are showing respect.

When the cancellation was announced last year, it was met with suspicion. The leadership at Paramount had recently changed. Depending on who you asked, the network’s relationship with the Trump White House was either compromised or pragmatic. After Bari Weiss assumed control of CBS News, the organization underwent a radical ideological shift.

With every Trump-era headline, Colbert’s nightly monologues became more incisive. Suddenly, Colbert appeared less like a lucrative franchise and more like an issue. Budgets were part of the official explanation. In reality, very few people in the industry held that belief.

According to Kaivan Shroff, a media analyst at the Yale School of Management Social Media Lab, every moment of the show is now viewed through the prism of Colbert versus the bosses, and for many viewers, Colbert versus something bigger, such as authoritarianism, censorship, or the slow corporate retreat from political risk. What could have been a quiet exit has become appointment television due to that framing. Clips of monologues go farther. Reservations for guests have symbolic significance. The chilly openings themselves seem like declarations.

The humanity Colbert has allowed himself to be in these last recordings is what makes the farewell land more difficult. He related the tale of his first episode in 2015, when the show literally would not export from the editing system, during a Q&A with his live audience three weeks prior. A few minutes prior to the broadcast, he and an editor named Jason Baker were on the seventh floor of the building, watching a progress bar freeze at the 1:30 mark of his monologue while his family was at a party across town. In the end, Baker defied convention by streaming the program straight from his own Avid computer. Colbert kicked open the door of an accounting office, picked up a bottle of Old Forester bourbon, and waited. “I don’t see us giving us a second show,” he recalled thinking.

He was nearly tied with Pope Leo XIV in public favorability, according to a recent NBC News poll—a statistic that sounds like a Colbert joke but isn’t. This devotion helps to explain why his fans are more interested in finding out where he will appear next than in lamenting the show. streaming. making podcasts. Perhaps something stranger. Shroff believes that part of the purpose of the lengthy farewell is to strengthen the relationship before the platform vanishes, so the audience follows him wherever he goes.

As we watch this play out, it’s difficult to ignore how infrequently television bids us farewell in a meaningful way these days. The majority of shows simply end. Colbert’s is coming to an end in public, in disagreement, in remembrance, and in a state of near grief. Depending on where you’re sitting, it could be a victory lap or a warning about the state of American broadcasting.