The Late Show with Stephen Colbert won its first-ever Emmy on Sunday, less than two months after news of its cancellation elicited a gleeful reaction from Donald Trump.
Colbert’s program won at Sunday’s Creative Arts Emmys in the category of outstanding directing for a variety series for an episode featuring actors David Oyelowo, Finn Wolfhard and Alan Cumming as well as a musical performance by the rock band OK Go.
Though Colbert himself had previously won 10 Emmy awards, it marked the first time the Late Show had brought home one of the prestigious statuettes during his tenure, which began in 2015 and is slated to end in May 2026 after CBS controversially decided in July to cancel it.
CBS moved to cancel Colbert’s show as the network’s parent company, Paramount, still awaited the federal government’s approval of an $8.4bn merger with the Skydance media conglomerate. Furthermore, at the time, Colbert had just criticized CBS for paying $16m to settle a lawsuit filed by Trump over the president’s claims that the network edited footage of an interview with Kamala Harris to make her look better in her unsuccessful White House run in 2024.
Legal experts widely believed CBS could defeat Trump’s claims of defamation in court, and on his show, Colbert dismissed the settlement as “a big fat bribe”.
Colbert announced three days later that he had been informed of his show’s cancellation. Trump – who had frequently been the butt of jokes on the Late Show – relished the news, posting on his Truth Social platform: “I absolutely love that Colbert was fired.”
The Late Show host replied that it had always been a dream of his for a sitting president to celebrate the end of his career and told Trump on air: “Go fuck yourself.”
Regulators at the Trump administration-controlled Federal Communications Commission later approved Paramount’s sale to Skydance.
CBS’s chair of television media, George Cheeks, in August tried to separate the cancellation of Colbert’s show from the politics of Trump’s second presidency. Instead, he blamed financial headwinds confronting the late-night talkshow format.
“The challenge in late-night is that the advertising marketplace is in significant secular decline,” Cheeks said at a news conference after Skydance’s takeover of Paramount. “We are huge fans of Colbert – we love the show.
“Unfortunately, the economics made it a challenge for us to keep going.”
The US entertainment news outlet Variety noted that many television industry insiders saw the Late Show’s Emmy win on Sunday as a reaction to public consternation generated by its cancellation at the hands of Paramount.
Colbert’s Late Show had amassed more than 30 Emmy nominations before Sunday’s victory by director Jim Hoskinson. Only AMC’s Better Call Saul had more Emmy nominations without a win, having famously lost on all of more than 50 nominations it had amassed during its run of six seasons, according to Variety.
The Late Show was also nominated in the category of talk series in the main Emmy ceremony scheduled for 14 September.
Emmy awards individually won by the outgoing Late Show host stem from his run on Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report. He had also been honored by the Emmys for a special aired on Showtime during the 2020 election that saw Trump’s first presidency end in defeat to Joe Biden.
That production was titled “Stephen Colbert’s Election Night 2020: Democracy’s Last Stand: Building Back America Great Again Better 2020.”
