"Next year will be our last season,” the late-night talk show host announced Thursday, July 17. "The network will be ending 'The Late Show’ next May."

Stephen Colbert's friends and colleagues are in shock at The Late Show's surprise cancellation.

Inside the Ed Sullivan Theatre in New York, Stephen Colbert was trying to make sense of that cataclysmic outcome in real time, both for himself and for the millions of viewers who had come to view him as an indispensable voice of comic insight and illumination.