Stephen Colbert’s Final ‘Late Show’ Draws Most Weeknight Viewers of His Tenure
Stephen Colbert's final episode of The Late Show attracted 6.74 million viewers, the highest for a weeknight episode during his tenure. This figure is significantly above the season average of 2.69 million viewers but still falls short of David Letterman's farewell episode viewership. The finale featured star-studded appearances and highlighted the changing landscape of late-night television viewership.
- ▪The final episode drew 6.74 million viewers, the most-ever for a weeknight episode.
- ▪Colbert's show averaged between 2.4 million and 2.7 million viewers per episode during its last season.
- ▪The finale included appearances by celebrities like Bryan Cranston and Paul Rudd, along with a performance by Paul McCartney.
5 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 3 hours. Coverage spans 2 points on the political spectrum — 3 lean left, 1 right.
- ▪ ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ Finale Attracts 6.74 Million Viewers, Its Most-Watched Weeknight Episode Of All Time — Variety
- ▪ ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ Ends Its Run With Most-Watched Weeknight Episode Ever — Deadline
- ▪ Colbert’s Final ‘Late Show’ Draws 6.7 Million Viewers — NYT > Top Stories
- ▪ Stephen Colbert’s final ‘Late Show’ wasn’t funny or emotional at all — just like his last 11 years — New York Post
The Hollywood Reporter files mainly under film tv. We currently carry 405 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Hollywood Reporter |
| Canonical URL | https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/stephen-colbert-final-late-show-ratings-weeknight-record-viewers-1236604629/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 20:16:44 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-22T20:32:02.974Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-22T20:32:02.974Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | TmNCnKurx8ei · 5 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert during Thursday’s May 21, 2026 show. Scott Kowalchyk/CBS Share on Facebook Share on X Google Preferred Share to Flipboard Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Send an Email Print the Article Post a Comment The final episode of the Late Show with Stephen Colbert drew 6.74 million viewers for CBS on Thursday, the most-ever for a weeknight episode, according to preliminary Nielsen data. That’s more than double the season average, with the Late Show generally drawing between 2.4 million and 2.7 million viewers an episode this past season, which was its last on CBS.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Hollywood Reporter.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from The Hollywood Reporter
