Stephen Colbert's "The Late Show" airs its final episode tonight on CBS, and President Trump summed up what roughly half the country is feeling in just two words: "Finally gone!" After years of bleeding viewers, hemorrhaging money, and turning what used to be a comedy show into a nightly DNC infomercial, the free market finally did what CBS should have done years ago.
Pop the champagne, folks. The man who spent a decade lecturing America from behind a desk nobody was watching just got canceled.
Breitbart's John Nolte called Colbert's farewell tour exactly what it is — "an orgy of self-worship." And he's not wrong. The second-to-last episode featured Colbert answering his own "Colbert Questionert" — yes, a segment named after himself where he interviews himself. Former CBS Evening News anchor John Dickerson was on hand to guide viewers "into the depths of Stephen Colbert," which is a journey precisely nobody outside the Upper West Side was asking to take.
The guest list for the final stretch reads like a Hollywood Democratic fundraiser: Billy Crystal, Robert De Niro, Mark Hamill, Ben Stiller, Aubrey Plaza, Jeff Daniels, Martha Stewart, Jim Gaffigan, Tiffany Haddish, "Weird Al" Yankovic, Josh Brolin, Amy Sedaris, and even Colbert's wife Evie McGee Colbert. James Taylor is apparently performing, because nothing says "farewell" like the musical equivalent of a Volvo commercial.
Notice who's not on the list? Regular Americans. Funny people. Anyone who's made someone laugh without first checking their voter registration.
But let's talk about the number CBS doesn't want you to focus on: $40 million. That's the reported annual loss "The Late Show" was racking up. Forty million dollars a year to produce a show that couldn't outdraw reruns. Johnny Carson made America laugh. Jon Stewart at least made his opponents think. Colbert just wagged his finger and called you stupid for not voting the way he wanted.
And the final episode? No announced guests. Just Colbert, alone with the audience that stuck around — however many of them are left. It's almost poetic. The man who spent years telling half the country they don't matter ends up in an empty room wondering where everybody went.
Here's the thing the entertainment industry still refuses to learn: audiences aren't captive anymore. You can't insult 75 million Trump voters every single night and then act shocked when they change the channel. Colbert didn't lose to another late-night host. He lost to the off button. He lost to people who'd rather scroll their phones than be told they're bigots by a guy in a suit.
The legacy media will spend the next week writing tearful tributes about Colbert's "courage" and "cultural impact." They'll call him "the voice of the resistance." They'll pretend his ratings collapse was about cord-cutting and not about content.
We know better.
President Trump's two-word review will outlast every fawning obituary the press cranks out this week. "Finally gone!" Short. Sweet. And exactly right. The free market spoke, CBS listened — eventually — and tonight, late-night television gets a little less insufferable.