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.

CBS is canceling “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” next May, shuttering a decades-old TV institution and removing from air one of President Donald Trump's most prominent late-night critics.