Stephen Colbert and CBS both say his show will end in May 2026

CBS is axing The Late Show With Stephen Colbert in May 2026, the host told an audience at a taping on Thursday.

The announcement came two days after Colbert spoke out against Paramount Global, the parent company of CBS, settling a lawsuit with U.S. President Donald Trump over a 60 Minutes story.

Colbert told the audience that he had learned the night before that "next year will be our last season. The network will be ending the Late Show in May."

The audience responded with boos and groans, and Colbert said, "Yeah, I share your feelings."

In his monologue on Monday night, he said he was "offended" by the $16-million US settlement reached by Paramount, whose pending sale to Skydance Media needs the Trump administration's approval.

"I don't know if anything — anything — will repair my trust in this company. But, just taking a stab at it, I'd say $16 million would help."

Colbert said the technical name in legal circles for the deal was "big fat bribe."

Paramount and CBS executives said in a statement that the cancellation "is purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night. It is not related in any way to the show's performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount."

The most recent ratings from Nielsen show that Colbert is winning his time slot, with about 2.417 million viewers across 41 new episodes. It also said his late-night show was the only one to gain viewers so far this year.

And this week, The Late Show was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding talk show for the sixth time. It also won a Peabody Award in 2021.

Critics of the settlement that ended Trump's lawsuit over the 60 Minutes editing of its interview last fall with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris suggested it was primarily to clear a hurdle to the Skydance sale.

Colbert followed Jon Stewart's attack of the Trump settlement a week earlier. Stewart works for Comedy Central, also owned by Paramount.

Colbert took over The Late Show in 2015, after becoming a big name in comedy and news satire working with Stewart on The Daily Show and hosting his own Comedy Central show, The Colbert Report.

He succeeded David Letterman, who began the show in 1993. Colbert's 10th anniversary as host is in September.

The show has gone in a more political direction since Colbert took it over. Alongside musicians and movie stars, he often welcomes politicians to his couch.

As Colbert announced his show was ending, he had just said that Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff of California was one of that night's guests.

"If Paramount and CBS ended the Late Show for political reasons, the public deserves to know. And deserves better," Schiff said on the social media platform X.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat from Massachusetts, released a similar statement, saying, "America deserves to know if his show was cancelled for political reasons."

Colbert has targeted Trump for years. From 2005 to 2014, The Colbert Report aired a satirical riff on right-wing news talk shows.

In his first Late Show monologue in September 2015, he said he was beginning "the search for the real Stephen Colbert."

His first guests were actor George Clooney and Jeb Bush, who was then struggling in his Republican primary campaign against Trump.

"Gov. Bush was the governor of Florida for eight years," Colbert told his audience. "And you would think that that much exposure to oranges and crazy people would have prepared him for Donald Trump. Evidently not."

Late-night TV has been facing economic pressures for years; viewership is down and many young viewers prefer highlights online, which networks have trouble monetizing. CBS also recently cancelled host Taylor Tomlinson's After Midnight, which aired after The Late Show.

But Colbert has been leading in the late-night entertainment ratings for several years. While NBC has acknowledged economic pressures by eliminating the band on Seth Meyers's show and cutting one night of Jimmy Fallon's The Tonight Show, there had been no such visible efforts at The Late Show.

Colbert's relentless criticism of Trump, his denunciation of the lawsuit settlement and the parent company's pending sale can't be ignored, said Bill Carter, author of The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night.

"If CBS thinks people are just going to swallow this, they're really deluded," Carter said.