Paul McCartney gave Stephen Colbert’s final Late Show the kind of ending that felt bigger than television. On the show’s last episode, McCartney appeared as the final guest and helped close out the program with a performance of the Beatles classic “Hello, Goodbye,” turning the Ed Sullivan Theater into a full-circle Beatles landmark all over again.
The appearance carried obvious historical weight. Colbert’s show is filmed in the same theater where the Beatles made their legendary U.S. television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, one of the most famous moments in rock history. McCartney’s return to that stage, 62 years later, linked two eras of late-night TV and made the finale feel like a direct echo of music history.
Colbert set up the moment with a joke about Pope Leo XIV supposedly being his final guest, only for the bit to collapse into comedy when McCartney walked out instead. McCartney said he was “just in the area” and had been “doing some errands,” while Colbert, clearly delighted, steered the conversation toward the Beatles’ first American television appearance.
The interview itself leaned hard into Beatlemania nostalgia. McCartney remembered the screaming girls in the balcony, joked that the Beatles had never even heard of The Ed Sullivan Show before arriving in America, and recalled Sullivan as “really nice” and “a really cool guy.” He also remembered the theater’s makeup room and the bright orange makeup the band was given before going onstage.
The final musical performance brought the whole thing home. McCartney sang “Hello, Goodbye” with Colbert on background vocals, while Elvis Costello and Jon Batiste joined in, and the show’s staff flooded the stage to sing and dance during the chorus. People reported that the audience joined them onstage during the song’s coda, turning the ending into a true company-wide sendoff.
The finale came after Colbert spent his final week welcoming heavyweight guests including Bruce Springsteen, Jon Stewart, Steven Spielberg and David Byrne, all part of a farewell run that underscored how much cultural ground the show covered over the years. CBS had announced the cancellation last July, citing financial reasons amid a difficult late-night landscape, though the move drew criticism from viewers who saw it as an attack on political satire.
For McCartney, the appearance was a rare perfect symmetry: the same theater where the Beatles cracked open America in 1964 became the place where Colbert closed out his run with one of the most beloved Beatles songs of all. It was part history, part celebration, and part goodbye — exactly the kind of ending that can only happen when the right guest shows up at the right moment.
https://x.com/SpencerAlthouse/status/2057687888599335071
