Late Show Dark This Week Ahead of Colbert’s Final 12 Episodes

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert has only a dozen new episodes left to air—but we’re going to have to wait for them.

CBS’ last late-night talk show standing, which was canceled back in July and will air its series finale Thursday, May 21, is dark this week as it takes its final hiatus.

Colbert and team will return with new episodes Monday, May 4, as The Late Show kicks off its final three-week run.

Little is known at this point about what the show has on tap for its farewell stretch. To date, only one guest has been announced—Barack Obama, whom Stephen Colbert will interview in Chicago at the Barack Obama Presidential Center (the former president’s soon-to-open library/museum/education project).

LateNighter back in January shared a list of ten guests we’d love to see visit with Colbert before his Late Show signs off. While former President Joe Biden was on our list, the Obama booking is equally momentous.

And if Colbert is heading to Chicago to chat up Obama, who’s to say he won’t also secretly rendezvous there with another of our picks—and Colbert’s oft-declared “dream guest”—Pope Leo XIV?

Also on our list: Late Show predecessor David Letterman, former band leader Jon Batiste, shock jock Howard Stern, fellow Daily Show alum Steve Carell, manager/late-night TV power player James “Baby Doll” Dixon, and a reunion of the 2023 Hollywood strikes-era “Strike Force Five,” aka Colbert and peers Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver. (Colbert has hinted that Oliver for one, who’s currently tied with Anderson Cooper as The Late Show‘s most-frequent guest, will indeed return.)

The show has been building toward an assuredly big finish in recent weeks, with final visits from other frequent flyers, including “favorite guest” Neil deGrasse Tyson, Jake Tapper, former U.S. Transportation Secretary/potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, and Senator Elizabeth Warren. We should get a better sense of who’s on tap for next week this Thursday or Friday.

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