Colbert signs off in final CBS ‘Late Show’

Who said what

“We were lucky enough to be here for the last 11 years,” Colbert told his audience when they booed his reminder it was the final episode. He closed the show with his fellow late-night hosts, beside an “interdimensional wormhole” threatening to swallow all of late-night TV. The premature death of Colbert’s show isn’t exactly “‘the death of late night’ — that funeral has been going on for decades,” James Poniewozik said at The New York Times. But it “feels like the end of a cultural era,” or “actually, two eras”: His “Colbert Report” skillfully “parodied politics,” and his “Late Show” unspooled through a “time when politics became a parody of itself.”

What next?

“The Late Show” is being replaced, starting Friday, with Byron Allen’s “Comics Unleashed,” which “features a rotating roundtable of comics” and is “purposefully evergreen in nature,” CNN said, meaning it “noticeably lacks any political humor.”