Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and John Oliver are reuniting Monday night on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, bringing Strike Force Five back to the same late-night world that made it a surprise hit two years ago. The gathering comes as Colbert prepares to sign off late next week, giving the reunion a built-in sense of farewell.
The five hosts launched Strike Force Five in August 2023, during the writers strike, when their shows were dark for nearly four months and they created a podcast to benefit their out-of-work staffs. It ran until October 2023, then ended after the writers returned to work. What made it click was not polish but personality: Kimmel played the deadpan ringleader, Colbert sounded like an enthusiastic late-night historian, Meyers was the quick-witted observer and Oliver, the lone premium-cable host, kept pace while Fallon became the target of repeated jokes for never finishing Moby-Dick, eating pizza in bed, thinking the Snake River might work like a lazy river and botching a Newlywed Game-style bit with the hosts’ wives.
That mix of teasing and shop talk gave the podcast its edge. The hosts compared set redesigns, celebrity interviews, disastrous pitches, network notes and the pressure of turning topical events into comedy night after night. Colbert even played an AI-generated ad that mimicked his cohosts’ voices, while Jon Stewart showed up to reflect on how fleeting topical comedy can be and David Letterman joined in a conversation that doubled as an affectionate oral history of the form.
The reunion matters because it brings together five of late night’s most visible figures at the point when Colbert is about to exit the stage. It also answers the question that lingered after the podcast ended in October 2023: whether the chemistry that carried Strike Force Five through a strike can still land now, after the industry has moved on and one of its hosts is heading for the door.
