‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ Ends Its Run With Most-Watched Weeknight Episode Ever
The finale of 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' attracted 6.74 million viewers, marking it the most-watched weeknight episode in the series' history. Stephen Colbert took over the show in September 2015, and the finale featured notable guests including Paul McCartney and other late-night hosts. The cancellation of the show has raised questions about its timing in relation to Colbert's recent comments on Paramount's financial decisions.
- ▪The finale episode garnered 6.74 million viewers, surpassing Colbert's debut episode.
- ▪Colbert's tenure began on September 8, 2015, with 6.55 million viewers.
- ▪The show was canceled three weeks before David Ellison took control of Paramount, citing financial reasons.
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.
- ▪ Stephen Colbert’s Final ‘Late Show’ Draws Most Weeknight Viewers of His Tenure — The Hollywood Reporter
- ▪ ‘The Late Show With Stephen Colbert’ Finale Attracts 6.74 Million Viewers, Its Most-Watched Weeknight Episode Of All Time — Variety
- ▪ 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
Deadline files mainly under film tv. We currently carry 598 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 | Deadline |
| Canonical URL | https://deadline.com/2026/05/the-late-show-with-stephen-colbert-finale-ratings-cbs-1236919372/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 22 May 2026 20:14:13 +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 finale of 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' on Thursday Scott Kowalchyk/CBS Stephen Colbert closed out The Late Show on Thursday night to the tune of 6.74M live + same-day viewers, per preliminary panel only data from Nielsen. That makes it the series most-watched weeknight episode ever, CBS says, even higher than Colbert’s very first episode as host. He signed on for duty on September 8, 2015 to around 6.55M viewers. The episode soared well ahead of the Q1 2026 audience average, which landed around 2.69M viewers in L+7. There have been various other special episodes of the late-night show that have garnered more viewers than this. For example, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert aired a post-Super Bowl episode in 2016 to 20.55M viewers.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Deadline.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Deadline
