In mid-July 2025, Yvonne De Mare got an irresistible job offer. She’d been working with Stephen Colbert for two decades, starting as an assistant director on “The Colbert Report” and following the comedian and host when he took over CBS’s “Late Show” franchise in 2015. For almost all of that time, Jim Hoskinson had directed Colbert’s shows, earning 14 Emmy nominations along the way. But Hoskinson had decided to retire, and De Mare was offered the director’s chair.
“It completely blew my mind,” said De Mare, who’d been planning to have a long-delayed knee surgery that summer. “I said, ‘Well, there goes the idea of getting my knee done in August.’”
A pause. “And then, three days after I got the director’s job, we got the news that the show was canceled.” She laughed. “I was like, ‘Well, OK. I got the job and the show’s going away, but I’ll have some time on the other end to get the knee taken care of.’
But first, 10 more months on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.” “There was a lot infused in that 10 months,” said De Mare, who has also worked on “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver,” “The Daily Show” and “The Rosie O’Donnell Show.” “But the craziness really kicked in in the last eight weeks, when we were doing lots of pre-tapes and all these different celebrities wanted to get on to get their last moments with Stephen.”
For those last weeks, De Mare watched the stagehands sometimes work from 6:00 a.m. until midnight to build sets for one night’s sketch and immediately break them down to make something else to pre-tape the next morning. “It was a nonstop hamster wheel of stuff,” she said.
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The final “Late Show” taping happened on May 21, with Paul McCartney as the last guest and Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd, Ryan Reynolds, Jon Stewart, Elijah Wood, Elvis Costello, Jon Batiste and fellow hosts Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver among those who made special appearances. Some appeared live, others in pre-taped segments that made use of special effects and weren’t completely finished until minutes before airtime. The atmosphere, De Mare said, was so chaotic that the import of what they were doing barely registered.
“It was such an intense day with all the different things going on,” she said. “Because of everything leading up to that day, I think nobody looked at it as the last show. We had been so focused on getting to that point that it became a race-to-the-finish kind of thing. We all just hunkered down trying to get through that day.”
For the final taping, the show added an extra camera operator to their normal group of five, plus a couple of robotic cameras positioned around the Ed Sullivan Theater. “We tried to cover all our bases,” she said.
In a way, though, the complexity of the finale helped the team in the control room. The opening stretch of the episode was a barrage of special guests, with constant interruptions from luminaries in the audience. But a running gag about technical difficulties in the theater segued into a lengthy sci-fi segment in which a glowing green portal materialized, summoned into existence by the logical impossibility of the top-rated late-night show being canceled.
“Jake Plunkett directed the portal stuff, which he had been working on for months,” De Mare said. “It was an insane amount of work, and even during rehearsal, we didn’t have the final version. But when we actually went into taping, that was easy, because once we got through the first half of the show with all the different celebs, then we got to the part that Jake did. For me, it was just ‘roll the tape.’
“I got to kind of, you know, sit back and take a breath, and then it was really doing the music, the live Paul McCartney song on the other end of it. And then getting the entirety of the crew and staff on stage to celebrate them.”
Make that almost the entirety of the crew and staff. As McCartney sang “Hello Goodbye,” the “Late Show” crew emerged from backstage and streamed onto the stage or onto catwalks behind and above the band—except for De Mare and her team, who were stuck in the control room running the show. Unable to join their co-workers, they posed for a shot where they were all waving to the camera. And then De Mare got preoccupied before with maximizing the number of crew members who could be seen in the final on-stage shot before she cut to a final backstage bit with Colbert and McCartney.
“I was so focused on trying to make sure that we ended with that shot that I edited over everybody in the control room was waving,” she said, shaking her head and laughing. “I completely blew out the control room and I felt terrible for everybody that worked so hard. But they understood.”
Only when it was all over did she feel the impact of what they’d just done. “It took me a minute,” she said. “For 10 months, it was just nonstop craziness. When we finally faded to black, it was sort of like, ‘Oh my goodness. It’s really fade to black this time. Wow.’
“It took a second, and then my technical director, Karen, and I looked at each other and hugged, and then tears started. We all started hugging in the control room, and it was really a beautiful moment.”
By the way, De Mare told these stories from her home, where she was sitting sideways in front of her computer with her leg propped up, a few days after finally having that knee operation. “Basically,” she said, “the only thing I’ve been focused on at this point is trying to get back on my feet.”
This story first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
