Stephen Colbert closed out The Late Show on Thursday night to the tune of 6.74M live + same-day viewers, per preliminary panel only data from Nielsen.

That makes it the series most-watched weeknight episode ever, CBS says, even higher than Colbert’s very first episode as host. He signed on for duty on September 8, 2015 to around 6.55M viewers.

The episode soared well ahead of the Q1 2026 audience average, which landed around 2.69M viewers in L+7.

There have been various other special episodes of the late-night show that have garnered more viewers than this. For example, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert aired a post-Super Bowl episode in 2016 to 20.55M viewers.

However, the end of the franchise is certainly a newsworthy milestone and clearly it attracted some attention. No surprise, especially given how vocal Colbert has been about CBS’ Ellison-owned parent company Paramount Skydance and its ties to the Trump administration.

Canceled three weeks before David Ellison officially took control of Paramount, the network stressed that it was “purely a financial decision against a challenging backdrop in late night” and “is not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at Paramount.” But since the cancellation came days after Colbert called Paramount Global’s $16 million settlement of Donald Trump’s lawsuit a “big fat bribe,” it’s been hard for many to believe the two things were unrelated.

Paul McCartney was his sole couch guest on the final-ever Late Show, but the CBS series packed its finale with visits from Colbert’s late-night peers John Oliver, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Andy Cohen as well as Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Elvis Costello.

The Late Show began in August 1993 with David Letterman as host, when he moved over from NBC after he didn’t get The Tonight Show gig. Letterman retired from the show in May 2015, and Colbert, who had previously starred on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, took over in September 2015.