Why “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” isn’t new this week

Stephen Colbert won’t be in the Late Show studio in the lead-up to Turkey Day.

CBS’ talk show will air reruns for all of Thanksgiving week, the network announced.

The Late Show‘s next five broadcasts will all feature episodes that originally aired within the last four weeks. Monday’s episode, which was originally broadcast on Nov. 12, features an interview with political journalist Jonathan Karl, who recently published his book Retribution: Donald Trump and the Campaign That Changed America. Pete Townshend also chatted with Colbert for an interview to discuss the Who’s farewell tour and sat in with Louis Cato and the Late Show Band.

Tuesday’s ep, which originally premiered on Nov. 10, features Demi Moore discussing season 2 of Paramount+’s Landman, as well as documentarian Ken Burns, whose series The American Revolution recently premiered on PBS.

Wednesday’s episode, which viewers first saw on Oct. 22, features Emma Stone discussing her latest Yorgos Lanthimos film Bugonia, plus a conversation with MSNBC journalist Alex Wagner, who recently launched her podcast Runaway Country.

Thursday’s Thanksgiving Day installment, which first aired on Nov. 3, sees Colbert interview Tom Hanks to discuss his new play This World of Tomorrow, as well as a performance by Mavis Staples.

And the episode for Friday, Nov. 28, which was first broadcast on Nov. 5, boasts an interview with Tiffany Haddish, who recently premiered her travel show Tiffany Haddish Goes Off. Gary Cole also appears to discuss NCIS.

Colbert’s Thanksgiving hiatus comes just six months before The Late Show will end for good on CBS. In July, the network announced that its flagship talk show would finish its run in May 2026, insisting that the decision was “purely financial” due to “a challenging backdrop in late night, and that the cancellation was “not related in any way to the show’s performance, content or other matters happening at [CBS parent company] Paramount.”

However, critics and politicians, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, questioned the motivations behind the show’s abrupt cancellation, noting that Paramount had recently reached a settlement with President Donald Trump over a 60 Minutes segment, which Colbert had criticized as a “big fat bribe.”

The network also was in the midst of a pending merger with Skydance that required government approval, which was ultimately approved by the FCC eight days after Colbert’s cancellation. David Letterman, who hosted the Late Show for 22 years prior to Colbert’s tenure, suggested that the talk show’s demise was connected to the merger.

“They don’t want any trouble along the lines of freedom of the press or free speech or freedom of expression. They don’t want to get their hands dirty,” the comedian opined of the Skydance heads. “They just want to make sure that on top of buying something that doesn’t have the same value as it had 30 years ago, they don’t want to be hassled by the United States government. So they want CBS to take care of all of that mess.”

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In a recent GQ interview, Colbert said that he doesn’t know why the show was canceled, but noted that he understands why others believe it may have been a move to appease Trump.

“I can understand why people would have that reaction because CBS or the parent corporation decided to cut a check for $16 million to the president of the United States over a lawsuit that their own lawyers, Paramount’s own lawyers, said is completely without merit,” he said. “And it is self-evident that that is damaging to the reputation of the network, the corporation, and the news division. So it is unclear to me why anyone would do that other than to curry favor with a single individual.”

Catch repeat episodes of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert every night this week at 11:35 p.m. ET/PT on CBS.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly