“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” had been nominated for outstanding talk series or outstanding variety talk series nine consecutive times.
On Sunday, the show finally emerged victorious in the Emmys category.
The outstanding talk series win was somewhat bittersweet, arriving months ahead of the exit of Colbert from the CBS late-night fixture and permanent end of “The Late Show,” announced in July.
But Colbert’s expression was all joy as he got onstage to accept the honor with his “Late Show” colleagues, who started a chant of “Stephen! Stephen!”
More staff from the show cheered from the audience.
Colbert used his time as an Emmys presenter earlier in the show to hand his resume and headshot to Harrison Ford (to give to Steven Spielberg) and announce he was looking for a job along with the 200 other people who work on “The Late Show.”
READ MORE: See Stephen Colbert hand Harrison Ford resume, headshot at the Emmys
Colbert told the audience that the late-night show is set to go dark this May.
But accepting the “Late Show” Emmy, Colbert, a longtime Montclair resident, was in full celebratory mode (see video below).
He has hosted “The Late Show” since September 2015, so the win capped a full decade that he’s manned the host’s desk on CBS.
“Thank you for this honor,” Colbert said. “I wanna 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.”
Accepting the Emmy, Colbert thanked his wife, Evelyn “Evie” McGee Colbert — who he called “the real brains of the outfit” — along with their children, Madeleine, Peter and John.
“I wanna dedicate this to my mom and dad, her mom and dad, and a young woman who should be here tonight, Amy Cole.”
Cole, Colbert’s executive assistant, died of cancer in 2024. She was 53 and had worked with Colbert for 16 years. Before “The Late Show,” she was his executive assistant on Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report.”
Colbert took the crowd back to 2015, when he was envisioning what he wanted his late-night show to look like.
It was months before the 2016 presidential election where President Donald Trump won against Hillary Clinton.
At the time, Colbert wanted to make the show about love.
READ MORE: ‘The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’ is ending. In shock move, so is the late-night franchise.
“At a certain point, and you can guess what that point was, I realized that in some ways we were doing a late-night comedy show about loss,” he said. “And that’s related to love because sometimes you only truly know how much you love something when you get a sense that you might be losing it. And 10 years later, in September 2025, my friends, I have never loved my country more desperately. God bless America. Stay strong, be brave, and if the elevator tries to bring you down, go crazy and punch a higher floor. Woo!”
CBS has attributed its decision to end “The Late Show” to a rough landscape for late-night shows at large, saying the move was a “purely” a “financial” one.
However, many have pointed to Colbert’s on-air criticism of its parent company Paramount’s concessions to Trump as a reason executives would want Colbert and the show out of the picture.
The announcement of the show’s end was made after Colbert skewered the company for paying Trump a $16 million settlement. The president had sued Paramount for $10 billion over claims he made about the editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, his opponent in the election.
At the time, Paramount was anticipating a merger with Skydance.
“As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I am offended and I don’t know if anything will ever repair my trust in this company,” Colbert said on “The Late Show” not long before its end was announced. “But just takin’ a stab at it, I’d say $16 million would help.
“I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles,” Colbert said. “It’s ‘big fat bribe.’ Because this all comes as Paramount’s owners are trying to get the Trump administration to approve the sale of our network to a new owner, Skydance … And some of the TV typers out there are blogging that once Skydance gets CBS, the new owner’s desire to please Trump could ‘put pressure on late-night host and frequent Trump critic Stephen Colbert.’”
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