Stephen Colbert on The Late Show in New York, July 17, 2025. (Photo by Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images)
CBS via Getty Images
When Stephen Colbert signs off from The Late Show on Thursday, it will be more than the end of one host’s run. It will close a 33-year CBS franchise that began with David Letterman in 1993 and continued with Colbert after 2015.
As The Late Show leaves CBS, the old late-night template is giving way to a more fragmented format built around clips, desk pieces, celebrity games and extended comic explainers.
CBS has said it is retiring The Late Show franchise rather than replacing Colbert, and Colbert himself framed the moment plainly: “I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.”
That makes this week less of a normal television finale and more of a format marker.
Late-night television has always been built on repetition: the monologue, the desk, the band, the couch, the second guest, the musical act, the goodnight. Its power came from ritual. Viewers didn’t just tune in for a host; they tuned in for a nightly structure that made the day feel processed, packaged and released.
Colbert’s exit arrives at a moment when that structure has been stretched by streaming, clips, podcasts and social video. The late-night show no longer lives only at 11:35 p.m. EST. Its best moments are often consumed the next morning, detached from the hour-long broadcast around them. That does not make the format irrelevant. It means the format has changed from a nightly appointment into a set of recognizable shapes.
How Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers And John Oliver Changed Late-Night
Each of the major late-night figures helped define one of those shapes.
Colbert brought the theatrical and institutionally minded version of late-night to CBS.
His Late Show was still recognizably old-school: a grand New York theater, a formal desk, a serious bandstand, a host whose delivery often leaned more essayistic than conversational.
In May, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver appeared together on Colbert’s show, reuniting the late-night hosts behind the 2023 Strike Force Five podcast. The moment underscored how much Colbert’s show had become a gathering point for the form itself.
Fallon, by contrast, helped turn late night into a game room.
When he took over The Tonight Show in 2014, the franchise returned to New York and leaned heavily into music, celebrity play, sketches and viral bits. His defining contribution was not one monologue style but a new understanding of the guest segment: celebrities were no longer only interviewed; they were invited to perform, compete, lip-sync, dance, confess or play.
Kimmel’s contribution has been durability. Jimmy Kimmel Live! has made him America’s longest-running current late-night talk show host, with ABC identifying the show as currently in its 23rd season. That longevity matters because Kimmel did not inherit one of the older NBC or CBS institutions.
His show gave ABC a sustained place in the traditional late-night format after its 2003 debut, while recurring pieces like “Mean Tweets” became part of late night’s internet-era vocabulary.
Seth Meyers refined the desk piece. Late Night with Seth Meyers retained the talk-show shell but found its identity in “A Closer Look,” a segment that made the host’s desk the center of the show rather than merely a station between monologue and couch.
Meyers’s version of late night is less variety-show carnival than extended comic explanation: structured, paced and written for viewers who may encounter it as a standalone clip.
John Oliver, though not a nightly broadcast host, may be the clearest sign of where the format went next. Last Week Tonight kept the desk, the host-as-guide posture and the joke density, but replaced the nightly rhythm with a weekly deep dive.
In an era when late night is increasingly consumed as clips, Oliver is not an outlier to the trend. He is one of its logical endpoints: the late-night segment expanded until it became the show.
Seen together, these hosts show the format splitting into distinct shapes: Colbert’s theater, Fallon’s party, Kimmel’s durable network franchise, Meyers’s desk analysis and Oliver’s extended comic explainers. The end of The Late Show does not end late night. But it does end one of its clearest lines of inheritance—Letterman to Colbert, CBS at 11:35, the host behind the desk in a landmark theater.
Late night will continue, but this week’s finale marks the retirement of a particular promise: that one broadcast hour, five nights a week, could gather the culture into a room and send it off with a joke, a guest and a band playing into the credits.
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