S Is for...

... Stephen Colbert, and the swan song of The Late Show, including the return of Strike Force Five.



I’m not taking stock of the wider state of late-night TV, at least directly, right now.
My aim is to gather some of the most interesting coverage of and content related to Colbert’s exit from the 11 o’clock hour after nearly 30 years, dating back to his days as
a Daily Show correspondent, over 20 of them as a host and 10+ broadcasting from the Ed Sullivan Theater.

Hey! Stephen recently led a tour of the Sullivan’s auditorium for Architectural Digest [14:29]. Known as CBS Studio 50 when it housed Ed’s “rilly big shew” and built a century ago as Hammerstein’s Temple of Music by Arthur Hammerstein in honor of his father, it’s possessed — as Late Show viewers have seen — of such remarkable features as a majestic dome refurbished and retrofitted with deft, modern graphic elements by Colbert’s staff.

The above, like all further video links in this post, goes to YouTube.

I had perhaps the coolest external look at the theater possible when visiting the
offices of DC Comics at 1700 Broadway across the street the week of New Year’s 1997. David Letterman was the latest tenant and, having already been designated a New York City Landmark, the Sullivan would soon be added to the National Register of Historic Places. Current owner Paramount Skydance Corporation’s plans for it are unclear.



The fact that I haven’t written about the recent upheaval, and barely about late-night
at all in several years despite my preoccupation with the subject, is just one frustrating aspect of the blog’s fallow period. And maybe this post is coming along right when you’re over the Colbert Farewellt, which is okay; I’m sorta feeling that way myself, like it’s been a couple of weeks since Christmas and seeing the decorations back up is weird. Still, I took care if a bit too much time in pulling this together and will appreciate having it for posterity down the road, so nyah.



We got a kind of equivalent of the cozy, immediate Christmas afterglow — a topic
here in 2009 — when, the night following his final Late Show, Colbert popped up in Michigan to guest-host an installment of extremely local public-access series Only in Monroe [1:00:16], repeating an exercise he’d undertaken in 2015. (Colbert borrowed the concept for a recurring segment on The Late Show with celebrities focused on their actual hometowns.)

I cannot properly express how genuinely delightful watching this was. Genevieve Benson, creative director of Monroe Community Media, seems during the hour to be more of a production assistant under duress, at one point turning straight around to admit to Stephen that there is a microwave on hand, “I was just ready to say no to you,” presumably in light of having to admonish him for rinsing and spitting on the floor. Let’s hope she continues to apply her It Factor in the name of good.

Only in Monroe’s regular hosts and Stephen’s main interview of the evening, Michelle Baumann and Kaye Lani Rae Wilson, told LateNighter in a piece on Friday they’d had to keep his return secret for months.



People has a charming video talk with Colbert [15:55] touching on his improv awakening, his Daily Show days, The Colbert Report, his children, the beginning and end of his Late Show tenure, and what comes next. Lacy Rose conducted a long print interview for The Hollywood Reporter on such topics and the mag released a featurette of Stephen taking questions from other late-night hosts [7:31].

Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, and Jimmy Fallon visited Colbert for a
joint conversation on The Late Show’s penultimate Monday. YouTube has an extended version of the segment [36:49], plus a few minutes of added talk and hijinks [3:00].

I greatly enjoyed that reunion of Strike Force Five — the quintet formed during the Writers Guild of America strike in 2023 for a group chat and then podcast whose proceeds went to paying their crew while production shut down rather than scabbily continue sans officially scripted material — but a new video episode of said podcast taped right before it [47:32] is even better. The friends are merciless towards one another in the best way and towards Fallon, who manifestly deserves it, most of all. I cackled with laughter as much as my carefully practiced asthmatic safeguards would allow.



The irony baked into sharing these links is that the reason given to Colbert and the general public for The Late Show’s cancellation, a couple of years after he negotiated
a shorter contract renewal than he’d been tendered, was how the franchise was hemorrhaging money. Of course many viewers eschew full episodes, as they air or via DVR or streaming, in favor of buzzworthy clips, but it’s hardly a strict transposition
and the late-night programs have long both repurposed content online and offered extended or supplementary material in the name of promotion, brand engagement,
and further monetization.

I’d been a dedicated watcher of The Late Show on TV and yet skipped its final
Monday entry as broadcast entirely because a completely uncut version of the massively sprawling and extremely shaggy episode, including the commercial breaks’ musical performances, was generously uploaded to YouTube [1:10:41].

More structured was an expanded version of the last week’s administration of the Colbert Questionnert to Stephen himself [48:36], emceed by John Dickerson with the participation of over a dozen surprise drop-ins from old friend Amy Sedaris to First Lady of The Late Show Evelyn McGee Colbert.



LateNighter has a scattershot behind-the-scenes report on the final episode and
other postmortems, among them successive ratings updates, for those who care to
poke around.

I read plenty of articles on Colbert’s legacy in the days leading up to his signoff, but at this point I’m really only compelled to share one from Rebecca Sofer, a Colbert Report staffer, who penned an essay on his ongoing engagement with grief and loss for Time.
I hope if you click just a single thing on this page it’s that.



The Late Show with Stephen Colbert set photos: Scott Kowalchyk for CBS
Broadcasting © 2026. Architectural Digest, Only in Monroe, and The
Hollywood Reporter screenshots © 2026 their respective holders.


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