It started with a crisis and became something none of them expected: a genuine friendship forged in the strangest way possible — by five late-night rivals sitting down together during a work stoppage to do what they do best.
The year was 2023. The Writers Guild of America went on strike in May, followed by SAG-AFTRA in July. Late-night television ground to a halt. The hosts — Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver — found themselves in an uncomfortable position: they were employed, their shows were the product of the labor being withheld, and their crew members were going without pay for months on end.
Their response was Strike Force Five.
Rather than simply going quiet and waiting for the storm to pass, the five hosts created a podcast together. Five men from five different networks and sensibilities, united by a single purpose: generate revenue that would go directly to their crews. The podcast was funny, unscripted, and genuinely revealing — you could hear the actual chemistry between people who had long existed as friendly competitors suddenly becoming something closer to collaborators.
Colbert personally continued paying his staff’s salaries during the strike, a decision that earned him enormous loyalty from his team and respect from across the industry. He was not merely a bystander to a labor dispute. He was an active participant in standing up for the people who made his show possible.
That shared history transforms what will happen on May 11th into something far more than a celebrity guest booking. When Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers, and Oliver walk into the Ed Sullivan Theater together, they are not coming as rivals or as faces collected to boost finale ratings. They are coming as people who showed up for each other when it mattered.
The reunion also serves as a kind of thesis statement about what The Late Show was at its best. Colbert never treated late night as a zero-sum game. He was competitive — you don’t hold the number-one spot for nine years by being complacent — but he also understood that the genre is stronger when its practitioners respect each other, support each other, and occasionally band together when the industry itself is under stress.
There’s a generational dimension here too. These five hosts represent the last great cohort of broadcast and cable late-night anchors. As the media landscape continues to fragment, as streaming eats into linear television’s audience, as the economics of late-night become increasingly difficult to sustain, it seems less and less likely that a new generation will be able to build the kind of decades-long institutions these men have helmed.
The May 11th gathering, then, is not just a send-off for Colbert. It is, in a quiet way, a gathering of an era — a recognition that what these hosts built together, separately and collectively, was something that may not be replicated.
When they sit on that stage together for what is likely one of the last times, they will be five friends who figured out, in the middle of a crisis, how to be brothers. The audience will laugh. And somewhere underneath the laughter, there will be grief — not just for a show, but for a kind of television that is passing with it.
