How Colbert Found Out His Show Was Canceled

Stephen Colbert is two months into processing the end of his Late Show run, and while "I've wrapped my head around" the cancelation itself, "in terms of how I feel about it, no, I don't know because the shows go on," he says in a new interview. Speaking with GQ—which notes it put him in swim trunks at the side of a pool at Hollywood's Chateau Marmont but did not make him smoke the joint in his hand—Colbert says he's focused on the next nine months of shows he needs to oversee before CBS pulls the plug. "It's all-consuming," he says, adding, "I don't necessarily know how I'll feel about it until I'm not doing it anymore."

He discovered his show was ending from his manager, not the network. "I was lying down on my couch with a pillow over my eyes going, 'Hey, James, what's going on?' I was prone. And he said, 'This is going to be the last season.' So I sat up and was like, 'Oh, okay. Well, that's interesting. I did not expect that." Colbert notes the Late Show is likely the first No. 1 show to be canceled. "The best reason to be number one is that the network does not f--- with you ... and we enjoyed nine unf---ed years," he says. He credit CBS for years of support, even if the cancellation came as a shock. CBS said the move was for financial reasons. "That's just the nature of show business," Colbert says. "It's clear that television is in a lot of transitions."

As for what his show has done, Colbert says late-night shows serve as a "third space" for Americans: "We are like your friend who at the end of the day paid attention to what happened today more than you did. And then we curate that back to you at the end of the day." Looking forward, "I just want to land this plane gracefully in a way that I find satisfying, given how much effort we've put into it for the last 10 years," he adds. As for what's next, there's no chance the host is walking away from show business. "No. No. Because I love creating things and I still want to work with the people I work with," Colbert says. "We're going to keep going. We're going to make something else."