Late Night Last Week: Hosts Return from Summer Break as The Late Show Starts Final Season

By Will DiGravio  |  September 9, 2025 | 10:01am
(Photos: CBS/ABC/HBO)
TV Features The Late Show With Stephen Colbert
Late Night Last Week: Hosts Return from Summer Break as The Late Show Starts Final Season

The eleventh and final season of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert began with a nearly flawless episode. The show’s cold open started with a promise: all questions will be answered. “What’s in Steven’s mug?” “Will Steven and Janet Yellen finally just do it?” “Who’s having a baby?”

Colbert, fresh off a final summer break, then launched into a predictably solid monologue, catching up his audience on the latest Trump news. But the real highlight of the show came in the form of the evening’s only guest: John Oliver. Our anointed king of late night is just as good on the couch as he is behind a desk.

Oliver has appeared on Colbert’s Late Show more than any other guest. In fact, last week marked his twenty-first appearance, which the two marked with a glass of champagne. As far as appearances go, Oliver sits just ahead, according to the host, of CBS newsman John Dickerson and Bravo’s Andy Cohen, who, it seems, is a bit of a hero to Oliver. You see, much of his appearance centered on The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, a show Oliver hailed as a masterpiece, “the most magnificent monsters on TV.”

“It’s a rich text,” he added.

The gift of the Oliver appearance was the chance to witness a rapport between two friends. It was also a reprieve from the overly produced segments that saturate so much late night, and indeed all of television. Oliver was quick to pivot the free-flowing conversation about Housewives, an NBC-owned property, to the suspicious forces behind his buddy’s final season.

“We’ve spent a long time talking about a Bravo! show,” Oliver observed. “CBS are not going to be happy, but …” Oliver and Colbert then shrugged, tapping their champagne glasses together.

And finally, the episode ended with some stand-up. In his set, Joe Dombrowski, a former teacher, recounted a discussion with two women at a bar who said that teachers were grooming kids to be gay in their classrooms.  “If teachers were teaching kids to be gay,” Dombrowski reasoned, “teachers would still teach cursive.”

Meanwhile, over on ABC, Jimmy Kimmel’s months-long summer break came to an end. Kimmel’s approach to the summer months, passing on the baton to numerous guest hosts, was once again a great success. If anything, it gave hope to the dying genre: perhaps the next crop of late night hosts are, indeed, out there.

 To give you a sense of just how long he was gone, Kimmel worked in the joke: “I got a summer gig working video camera at the Coldplay concert.” Remember that? No? Lucky you.

Like Colbert, Kimmel dedicated his monologue to President Trump, focusing on all the stuff that he, the host, had missed. It’s an odd impulse, one that feels a bit too detached. Did he think that we too had unplugged while on our multimillion-dollar vacations?

Kimmel also shared the news that he will, once again, be returning for a week of shows in his native Brooklyn. This has been a long-running tradition for the host, and a nice change of pace for the program. The host shared that the week of shows, which will be taped at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, will feature a special guest: Stephen Colbert.

“We [will] have a lot to talk about that day,” Kimmel said.

Finally, let us end by returning to our champion. On September 7, John Oliver returned to the hosting chair following a vacation of his own. Sunday’s Last Week Tonight monologue centered on President Trump’s “ongoing war with higher education.” As always, Oliver deftly unpacked the administration’s targeting of diversity programs, student protesters, and research funding—and how this attack from the right goes back decades.

Oliver sees the field quite clearly. It is not that these are just attacks on universities, but that they are efforts to reshape them in the conservatives’ image. And even as universities like Columbia capitulate, the attacks continue.

“They caved in about five seconds, officially solidifying Columbia’s reputation as the ‘little bitch’ university,” Oliver said. “Rather than what it was known as before, being the place that Timothée Chalamet went to for five minutes before realizing he didn’t need it.”

It’s not just free speech and intellectual freedom that are at risk. Cuts to research funding will have a real impact on public health—even if the right-wing press likes to mock them. He cites a 2006 study on shrimp that was the target of right-wing attacks as an example; the study was ultimately used to help keep bacteria out of seafood.

“The point is, somewhere out there is a weird little tree frog that jizzes the cure for cancer,” Oliver said. “And some scientist probably working at a university is going to discover that because they had a healthy curiosity about frog cum.”

 Will DiGravio is a Brooklyn-based critic, researcher, and late night comedy columnist, who first contributed to Paste in 2022. He is an assistant editor at Cineaste, a GALECA member, and since 2019 has hosted The Video Essay Podcast. You can follow and/or unfollow him on Twitter and learn more about him via his website.

 
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