Stephen Colbert is opening up about what’s next for him after The Late Show ends in May 2026.
Colbert, 61, and his team took home the award for Outstanding Talk Series at the 2025 Emmy Awards on Sunday, September 14, for the very first time after multiple nominations over the past decade.
Speaking to Us Weekly and other outlets backstage at the Emmys, the comedian said he is focused on making The Late Show appointment TV over the next nine months, indicating that he hasn’t lined up his next gig just yet.
“I love what we do, and I want to go to work on Tuesday and for the next nine months with these people and work hard but have fun,” Colbert said. “We do the show with each other; we do the show for each other every day. And then I have the privilege and the responsibility that day to share with the audience what we did. And I love it, and I know it’s coming to the end in May, but I’m going to savor every day of it. I want to land this plane absolutely beautifully, and I got nothing else on my mind.”
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Despite winning for The Late Show for the first time, Colbert is a previous Emmy winner for his work on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report.
Asked how this latest win compares to his past victories, Colbert commented, “The Report was sort of its own singular thing. It was done in a block with The Daily Show, and it came out of that DNA, and in my mind, I was always doing a field report for Jon Stewart that just took 10 years to finish.”
“When we moved over to do The Late Show, it was like going — and I don’t think this pejoratively, just in terms of the attention, the work, the pressures, all that kind of stuff — it’s like going from a college newspaper to writing for the Times,” he continued.
Colbert said he didn’t “realize the enormity of the job” when he took over The Late Show in 2015 but said the show has “made our own mark and done our own thing” in the pantheon of late night television.
The Late Show is set to come to an end next year after CBS canceled it in July. At the time, the network said it was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night” and was “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount,” which was in the middle of a merger with Skydance Media at the time of the show’s cancellation.
“I want to thank CBS for giving us the privilege to be part of the late-night tradition, which I hope continues long after we’re no longer doing this show,” Colbert said in his acceptance speech on Sunday.
