Former After Midnight host Taylor Tomlinson, the only woman to host a major network late-night show when she debuted in 2024, has revealed what it felt like to “disappoint” Stephen Colbert when she left the gig a year and a half later.
Tomlinson revealed the phone call she had with the host, who was an executive producer on her CBS show, in an excerpt from her new memoir, Actually, Nevermind, published in The Hollywood Reporter.
“I realized this wasn’t just a bad year, a tough moment, a difficult chapter,” she wrote, explaining why she chose to step down.
“It was the inevitable result of a decade of overworking myself,” she continued. “Quitting the show was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever made. Nearly two hundred people worked on After Midnight, and my leaving could jeopardize a job they loved. I almost stayed for that reason alone.”
After Midnight, which Colbert recruited Tomlinson to host, aired immediately after The Late Show from January 2024 to June 2025. Tomlinson didn’t talk to him before deciding to quit, which she later regretted when he called.
“I spent that call with Stephen (Mr. Colbert? Not sure how to address him now) crying and apologizing before I got off the phone, shaking with shame,” she wrote. “I felt awful and guilty and yet again—disappointing.”
She continued, “I understood why he was upset. He had told me to call him if I ever needed to talk about anything, and I had not called him about this. I wasn’t trying to blindside him; I was just afraid to bother someone so important and busy.”
Tomlinson rose from church comedian to mainstream comedy sensation after Netflix released her special Quarter-Life Crisis in 2020. Colbert discovered the star on social media, he told Entertainment Weekly in 2024. “When she was just starting out, the algorithm started feeding her to me years ago,” he said at the time. “I remember thinking, ‘Who is this special woman?’”
Tomlinson recalled feeling resolute about her decision, even though she understood why Colbert was less than pleased with the news. “It must have been infuriating and confusing, watching someone you believed in, someone you had hired for what is, objectively, a dream job, throw it away. Nobody just walks away from a television show,” she wrote.
Like Colbert, whose own show ended in May after CBS axed the franchise after his feud with Donald Trump, Tomlinson had hoped the network would replace her as host.
“I wanted more than anything for CBS to renew the show and just replace me as host. After all, wasn’t that the benefit of having a format-driven show? A new host is not a novel idea,” she shared. Either way, she couldn’t stomach continuing the job.
“The feedback I got most was ‘I wish you had talked to me first,’” Tomlinson wrote. “But I did give it a chance. I hosted one hundred episodes and, in that time, I had gently pitched a handful of adjustments that could have made it easier for me to stay at the show long-term.”
The comedian wrote that the biggest change she needed was for CBS to allow for a fill-in host for when she was sick. “I was told CBS would just play a rerun and the crew would lose a day’s work,” she explained. “So, regardless of my health, I never missed a day” to avoid being seen as a “difficult, entitled woman.”
The relentless schedule caused her “physical and mental health” to “deteriorate,” she said. “I know I couldn’t have kept hosting and been OK.”
Still, “disappointing” Colbert and the staff on her show, who ultimately lost work when CBS decided not to renew the show after her exit, left her feeling “guilty.”
She concluded in the excerpt, “What’s that quote—‘You can’t set yourself on fire to keep others warm’? Some days this comforts me. Others I think, You should have gone up in flames, you selfish b---h.”
