The Hollywood trade publication Variety has demonstrated a dramatic anti-Trump bias – they’d call it an anti-fascist bias. So it was shocking that they published an article under the headline “Stephen Colbert’s Long ‘Late Show’ Goodbye Has Gone From Resistance to Ego Trip.”
TV reviewer Daniel D’Addario — who just weeks ago trashed the new CBS Evening News anchorman Tony Dokoupil as an untalented but ambitious man with his finger in the wind — could not abide Monday’s episode, where actor John Lithgow read a Colbert-ogling poem titled “The Mighty Colbert.”
Lithgow honored the “sublime masterworks” that are Colbert’s monologues, and asked, “So why is he canceled? Why trash all that pleasure? Why yank off the air this beloved national treasure? Stephen’s tale is a lesson for all who come after: Beware of a boss with thin skin and no laughter.”
Even the leftists at VARIETY thinks that CBS is enabling a long Colbert ‘ego trip,’ as John Lithgow reads Stephen a poem about how he’s a National Treasure. *urp* pic.twitter.com/sAPlnzemtQ
— Tim Graham (@TimJGraham) March 15, 2026
D’Addario declared “by this point in his lame-duck tenure, Colbert is likely accustomed to endless fawning from his guests!” He declared the news of his cancellation “seismic,” but added “What has ended up making it to air has been an increasingly puffy tribute to the show’s own host. The endless bouquets being tossed Colbert’s way have started to make the studio smell a bit cloying.”
He acknowledged that Colbert’s famous fans are truly emotional on his set. “But the show’s focus on its own host’s misfortune has become outsized and a bit dramatic, especially because so many other institutions are in crisis: With everything else going on in the world, we have to go through a monthslong celebration-of-life for a comedian whose job is coming to an end?”
Clearly, boosting Colbert as both a legend and a victim is an important part of Colbert’s next chapter.
“The cause of standing up for a comedian who may have been tossed aside for angering the regime is getting tied up in honoring Colbert the celebrity, and it’s starting to feel wearying,” D’Addario wrote. “Colbert deserved better treatment from CBS, but watching one person beam while receiving laurel after laurel doesn’t make the argument for his show’s relevance, as it’s frankly not very good TV, and — for this relentlessly political host — not in touch with the concerns of people who have been turning to The Late Show for its political perspective.”
He concluded that Colbert’s career is far from over, but “When that day comes, won’t it feel like an anticlimax, after we’ve already spent the better part of a year celebrating him?”
