On May 21, 2026, the lights went out at the Ed Sullivan Theater for the last time under a Late Show banner, and the man who turned them off was Paul McCartney. Stephen Colbert had spent eleven years hosting at that address on Broadway in Manhattan, and the finale he delivered was not a somber eulogy but a surreal, star-packed, deliberately chaotic farewell that felt like the show itself refusing to go quietly. The night began with Colbert telling his studio audience that he intended to treat the final episode exactly like every other episode, a statement interrupted almost immediately by Bryan Cranston rising from his seat in a Late Show cap, followed by Paul Rudd, Ryan Reynolds, and Tim Meadows, each convinced he was the show’s intended final guest. Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth 
Meyers, and John Oliver appeared together as the full Strike Force Five podcast reunion, pushing Colbert toward a proper ending. A fictional wormhole opened onstage and swallowed Andy Cohen whole. Colbert staged an elaborate fakeout around his publicly stated dream guest, Pope Leo XIV, the Chicago-born American pontiff he had described for months as his white whale, only to announce with a straight face that His Holiness had canceled because the production team had gotten his dressing room snacks wrong. Into that opening walked Paul McCartney, who sat beside Colbert and told the audience that the Beatles had never heard of the Ed Sullivan Show before arriving in New York in February 1964, that the makeup artists backstage had painted them bright orange, and that the whole thing had simply been fantastic. Colbert and McCartney then performed Hello, Goodbye together, joined by original Late Show bandleader Jon Batiste, current bandleader Louis Cato, and Elvis Costello, as the entire production crew streamed onto the stage and danced through the number in a long winding line while the house band gave the song a full New Orleans coda at the end. When the last note landed, McCartney walked to the lighting board and cut the power to the theater. On the Broadway sidewalk outside, Colbert’s dog Benny sniffed around a snow globe replica of the Ed Sullivan Theater, the Late Show theme playing faintly from somewhere inside it, as Colbert said off camera, come on, Benny. The franchise had run for 33 years, first under David Letterman beginning in 1993 and then under Colbert from 2015, and CBS confirmed the show would not be handed to a successor. The finale drew 6.47 million viewers, the most-watched weeknight episode in the show’s entire history.
