A petition is circulating to keep The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on television. As of Wednesday afternoon, 204,997 people signed a petition aiming for 250,00 signatures. The petition came after Colbert announced the show would end in May 2026.

Since Stephen Colbert announced that the "Late Show" was canceled, viewers and industry insiders alike have been quick to offer dueling explanations.

As host of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” the comedian has been successful, receiving critical praise and leading the program to regularly becoming the top-rated late-night show, outpacing his younger rivals Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel — albeit against the backdrop of what Reuters termed “late-night TV’s fade-out.

The View" co-host Sunny Hostin suggested on Tuesday that the decision to cancel “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" could lead to the end of democracy.

Stephen Colbert shares a pointed message after President Trump celebrated CBS's stunning decision to end 'The Late Show.' Late-night hosts Jon Stewart, John Oliver and others rally behind Colbert.

Two of the biggest and most opposite stories in entertainment this week involve the same company: Paramount Global, owners of both Paramount Pictures and CBS television. On the one hand, they’ve cancelled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Colbert’s late show on CBS has never won a TV Academy prize. The president could well now have changed that. The video plays like a cave painting from the Neolithic era or, even more distantly, from when late-night television still mattered: Stephen Colbert sits in the host chair and makes amends with Donald Trump.

Colbert called it an “insane thing” to put on social media. “If you or I put up an AI video depicting the violent arrest of a former president, we would get a free ride in a windowless van to FBI headquarters, where they would put us to work redacting Trump’s name from the Epstein file,” Colbert said. And that may not even be the worst of it.