First on LateNighter: CBS’s 33-year-old Late Show franchise appears to be going out with a bang, crash, thump, and maybe even a crowd-pleasing splat.
On the eve of David Letterman‘s final visit to the show he launched in August 1993, and a little over a week out from Stephen Colbert‘s sign-off after 11 years, the two hosts were spotted on the roof of the Ed Sullivan Theater Building where the CBS talker tapes.
Also seen, escaping their grasp and commencing a precipitous plunge to the pavement eight stories below, was a Late Show guest chair.
That’s right, folks. We’re gonna be dropping things from a great distance, as Letterman famously did first on NBC’s Late Night, and later on CBS’s Late Show.
“Holy sh*t y’all this is not a drill,” Bluesky user Carolyn Petit wrote Wednesday afternoon, sharing the photo she snapped of the callback stunt (above). “David Letterman and Stephen Colbert are dropping stuff off the rooftop of a building near the Ed Sullivan Theater!”
Letterman’s storied experiments in the name of “physics” began on Late Night, where he would lob fluorescent light bulbs, watermelons, cans of paint and the like from atop a five-story tower, all in the name of scientifically observing—replayed in crowd-pleasing slow motion—how exactly they smacked the ground below.
In this July 1984 Late Night segment, for example, Dave fulfilled a few viewer requests by dropping from a tower surgical gloves filled with pudding, a bottle of champagne, and a disco ball, among other items.
And in the November 1994 Late Show video below, Letterman remotely guided staffers as they heaved things out of a seventh-floor Ed Sullivan Theater window. In the segment seen being taped today, he and Colbert were stationed by that roof’s ledge itself.
Letterman back in the day would similarly crush a variety of items using a hydraulic press, again emphasizing the implosions via slow-motion replay.
Letterman makes his latest and final appearance on The Late Show this Thursday night. The Strokes—as picked by Dave himself—will also appear as the musical guest.
Colbert’s Late Show finale airs the following Thursday, May 21, ending his own 11-year run as host—and the CBS franchise itself.
