There are final weeks of television and there are final weeks of television. Most shows in their farewell stretch book respectable guests, produce emotional retrospective segments, and close with the kind of dignified send-off that honors the program’s history without quite managing to feel equal to it.
What Stephen Colbert has assembled for the final stretch of the Late Show is something that exists in a completely different category. Night by night, the confirmed guest list reads like a document from an alternate universe where every person you would want to see on this stage in these final days actually agreed to come.
Tonight: Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Pedro Pascal (May 12)
The final week opens with two of the most beloved performers in the current cultural moment. Julia Louis-Dreyfus — whose career spans four decades and whose status as one of the greatest comedic performers in television history is uncontested — alongside Pedro Pascal, whose transformation into one of the most universally adored actors working today has made him the kind of guest whose mere announcement generates its own trending cycle.
Tonight’s episode is the warm opening movement of a week that builds toward something historic.
Tomorrow: Barack Obama and Tom Hanks (May 13)
If tonight is warm, tomorrow is seismic. Barack Obama and Tom Hanks on the same Late Show episode in Colbert’s final week is a combination that requires a moment of genuine appreciation before it can be fully processed.
Obama’s appearances on the Late Show have always generated the specific electricity of a public figure who is genuinely funny, genuinely relaxed in the format, and genuinely capable of saying things that the sitting office would not have permitted. Tom Hanks is Tom Hanks — the most universally trusted and beloved public figure in American entertainment, whose presence on any stage confers a specific legitimacy and warmth that no other guest can replicate.
Together, on the second-to-last full week of the show, they represent something about what American public life can look like at its best.
Wednesday: David Letterman and The Strokes (May 14)
And then there is Wednesday. David Letterman returning to the Ed Sullivan Theater — the stage he occupied for 22 years — to sit across from the man who inherited his desk and his legacy is the single most emotionally significant guest booking in the history of this program. The conversation that follows will be unlike any other in the farewell run because Letterman is the only person in the world who fully understands what Colbert is experiencing right now.
The Strokes performing alongside that conversation adds a musical punctuation that is perfectly calibrated — a band whose own relationship to New York City’s cultural history makes them an ideal musical companion for a night about legacy and endings and what great things leave behind.
Nine days until May 21st. This week is unmissable.
