Series finales for late night shows are, by their nature, a little odd and also exceedingly rare; usually it’s the host’s final episode, and not the entire show’s, as franchises like The Tonight Show or Late Night continue on with someone new at the wheel. But CBS made the, ah, visionary decision to cancel the Late Show, the talkshow it created in 1993 as a new home for David Letterman after he failed to score the Tonight Show job over at NBC. In Letterman’s hands, and eventually Stephen Colbert’s, the show became an institution and the first real, sustained Tonight Show competitor in years.
Indeed, the CBS Late Show leaves the air as the No 1 show in network TV late night, with that 11.35pm real estate immediately and ignominiously rented out to Byron Allen’s longtime syndication seat-filler Comics Unleashed. It’s a stunning streaming-era abdication that will for ever be tied with US president Donald Trump, even as the network has insisted (as echoed by a dolphin in a finale gag) that the decision was purely financial, not political. (Naturally, the show has received plenty of promotion on its way out the door, as if it were just going on its merry way.) Colbert himself has had nearly a year to come to terms with the decision, and was far past using his platform to rail against the corporate dolts on his cheerful (if unavoidably bittersweet) final instalment.
