The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2015-????)

CBS is rolling out all the platforms for the show today, including this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rFtam2eAkfo

The continued bits of shaven beard falling on the hot dog is grossing me out, but that's probably intended.
Sort of a weird tone about the whole thing, though. If this show ends up completely low-key and strange like Craig Ferguson's show was, I'll love it!

Also, some podcasts.

lol

https://www.yahoo.com/tv/stephen-colbert-late-show-video-david-letterman-120634160835.html

d'oh sorry

tone is v Strangers w Candy so = YES

this is going to suck

My hopes and dreams of They Might Be Giants as The Late Show house band are dead. Jon Batiste is cool, though.

http://time.com/3907726/jon-batiste-bandleader-stephen-colbert/

huh. something about him has always bugged me, but i look forward to seeing lots of New Orleans musicians on, hopefully.

https://twitter.com/kylebuchanan/status/606538376242528256

And Conan's bandleader is Italian and Kimmel's is Latino.

The last new host younger than Letterman/Conan to have a white bandleader was Carson Daly—that was Joe Firstman—and he was HORRIBLE. I'm all for affirmative action in late night band hiring, because we've seen the alternative and the alternative is not good.

Oh wait, I completely forgot about Seth Meyers and his band of 90s indie rock burnouts (+ Marnie Stern) who play the limpest rejoinder music on tv.

Fred Armisen is all races

you misspelled RAPISTS

i can def. imagine someone in HR hiring fred armisen and then joyously ticking off every box on the "diversity in the workplace" survey.

http://morningafter.gawker.com/stephen-colbert-paints-his-nails-talks-to-eminem-on-pu-1715231700

8^O

The colbert public access thing was good, esp liked the news item on the local yelp beef

I would rather watch him interview local nobodies instead of celebrities.

It could have taken a mean turn but he did a good job keeping the show human and giving the guests space to have fun with the thing too. He seems like a pretty generous-spirited guy.

http://www.gq.com/story/stephen-colbert-gq-cover-story

why do writers exist

We were talking about the logistics involved in pulling off something like this, and how great it felt for him to be improvising in front of a camera again, and the curious tensions that popped up in his interview with Eminem. And then we got onto the subject of discomfort and disorientation, and the urge he has to seek out those feelings, and from there it was a quick jump to the nature of suffering. Before long we were sitting there with a plate of roast chicken and several bottles of Cholula on the table between us, both of us rubbing tears from our eyes.

Ten years ago, the country was palpably more afraid and angry.

haha waht

that's probably true

In 2005 9/11 was a much fresher and more frightening memory and the ongoing catastrophe that was the Iraq war gave plenty of cause for anger.

it SHOULD be fucking terrified right now

That's a hard way to live, morbs. There are too many terrors to take them all into account all the time, and most people are grateful to have a few days of respite from them, even if it is by turning a blind eye.

why do writers exist

whatever, it's a good article

fluffy

kinda weird to watch his first show because usually first shows (and first weeks and months) kinda suck for late night guys, but i've been watching colbert for so long that it's tough to give him the new guy break. show had it's moments, good and bad.

lol at jeb! but that was gonna be lol no matter what

ITS

his logo looks like the 700 club or something

Seems like it's about half Colbert Report and half typical network late night show. Works for me.

forgot it was tonight

the non colbert report parts were pretty awk though it feels like he had a lot of meetings with very panicky cbs execs who don't know how to function in this strange jimmy fallon world

i know it'll get better but yeesh

turned it off during jeb that was tough to watch

Eh, I thought he handled the parts of the show that he's not been doing for the last 9 years already pretty well. Clooney's not traditionally a great talk show guest (he seems like one on paper, but in reality he's kind of a stiff). Jeb! Bush was as disengaged and awkward as I'd expected he would be, so no surprise there. Stephen may handle the interview segments better when he has guests that better fit what he's going for.

i generally detest Clooney's personality, but he had a fine moment on Letterman once. "...We're doing Ocean's 12.... (big grin) Because Solaris bombed."

I liked the bit where he paid tribute to "the man who has owned that stage for the last 22 years...I'm talking about Biff Henderson".

I remember during that awesome last Tom Waits performance hoping the moment wasn't ruined for Dave because he was handcuffed to George Clooney

It was a good show. The Trump and Jeb bits could've run as is on the Report. I don't get people who immediately write him off because he's on a network now, or act like network comedy is somehow always inherently inferior to cable. I'm seeing that on Twitter about Colbert's show and it's just kind of silly.

Yeah, I mean he's at 11:30 on a broadcast network and going against The Tonight Show and Jimmy Kimmel. CBS isn't going to allow him to go full Colbert with the position he's in. Should they? Yes. But they aren't going to.

I really hope the first half of the show is spent at the desk every night Report-style. If that sticks, the rest is gravy.

If there's one thing I think they should be OK dropping, it's the standing bit at the start.

Unless he continues to spot his turns like that.

Caught the end of this, it was pretty entertaining. Fun music performance at the end. I like the 'new' character.

I did like Clooney's fake movie skits, it kind of felt like something Letterman would have done.

Since all of my reality seems to be on a 20 hour tape delay I'm just watching this now. I like that the band leader plays a melodica.

Hoo boy, second night was a little bit rougher.

Kendrick fucking slayed it though!

Yes and yes.

I just watched Kendrick's performance and holy shit

the sketchy CBS stream i was using blew up just before he came on so i missed it.

Kimmel's studio actually has two spots for music: an indoor faux-club and an outdoor stage for bigger acts.

Club:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmQAG-huHPQ

Outside:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AYeDnOLfl0g

I noticed when looking for these that it seems like Kimmel's recently been booking a lot of nostalgia acts (Offspring, Simple Minds etc.) doing old songs, so it's understandable to not have those come up in one's recommendations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_B4ojYSyJ0

The cancelation might be political, but I suspect Colbert's audience is on the old side. Advertisers want a young audience, and that could affect things too.

CBS has been the old people network for a long time

on the one hand CBS has its lineup of fascist cop shows on the other it has a bunch of multiracial woke sitcoms as the lead in to those fascist cop shows

Former NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell who was fired after CNBC anchor alleges sexual harassment against him is the guy pulling the strings to do the Paramount skydance merger, hire Bari Weiss, and fire Colbert. He will be in charge : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/04/23/1171525533/nbcuniversal-ceo-jeff-shell-inappropriate-relationship

Def. a pretty clear current PR push on the part of CBS claiming that the Late Show was hemorrhaging money. Which may be true, who knows, but it's a talking point pivot away from politics.

There was an interesting discussion of the $$ on The Town podcast, basically saying that even though Colbert is the #1 late-night show, that his show doesn't have as much digital reach as the NBC shows or Kimmel, which all create content designed to perform well on YouTube and social media, which helps them to earn more revenue. Also that Kimmel and Fallon pull double-duty by hosting prime-time game shows and awards shows, whereas Colbert is really just his show. They were saying it's telling that CBS seemed to have no interest in replacing After Midnight with anything special, and that also they are cancelling Late Show entirely, not just firing Colbert. (See also: firing Seth Meyers' band last year and just using canned music.) While you can't say politics don't play a role--they do!--these moves to fully eliminate their late night slate seem to be saying that they really don't want to spend their money this way. The sheer quantity of episodes--40 weeks per year--make it really expensive, while ad revenues for late night shows across the board have fallen by 50% over the last few years.

The "Hemorrhaged" money is all lost ad revenue. Some commentators are seizing on that CBS apparently never tried to slim down the Late Show budget like at all--no attempts at staff reductions, cutting the band etc.

A telling thing about the end of After Midnight was that it meant the shuttering of the CBS West Coast Late Night division after about 30 years in business (Snyder->Kilborn->Ferguson->Corden->Tomlinson) which certainly freed up some money and forecast further savings by 86'ing the mothership.

Some commentators are seizing on that CBS apparently never tried to slim down the Late Show budget like at all--no attempts at staff reductions, cutting the band etc.

this came up in a similar discussion to the one pgwp is describing between matt belloni and bill simmons on the latter's podcast and simmons asked belloni why they didn't offer to cut colbert's production down to the bone, to "reimagine" the format etc and belloni made the argument that downsizing the show -- which is to say making colbert fire hundreds of people, take a huge reduction in salary himself, relocate the show to a small dingy studio somewhere -- is a less dignified end than just outright cancelling the show. and having been thru the online media version of this process on several occasions i do agree that nobody ever feels happy about something they built with a group of people being left on life support to be tended to by the few people who were "lucky enough" to be "spared" layoffs. i don't want to impart undue humanity onto skydance executives but i do think it's likely that colbert would have turned down an offer to continue the show in such a fashion

I guess they can just film these late night shows in the host's living room and have the guests join on Zoom.

they all did that during the pandemic and none of them were any good. the monologues don't really work without an audience.

Yeah, but the savings!

Does anyone enjoy those opening monologues? When I was in my early teens for some reason there was a NBC Europe broadcasting the Tonight Show and Late Night, and while it quickly became clear to me that Leno was lame and Conan was cool, the actual jokes in their monologues were almost identically hack shit - when Conan was nevertheless funny it was because he was mocking the jokes or veering off into clownish tangents.

belloni talks about this on the simmons podcast too but the imprimatur of the brand matters -- everyone can lowkey understand that at this point the tonight show just exists as a content mill for viral online media, but if NBC turned the tonight show into "jimmy fallon's living room" the level of talent that would show up for the song and dance when it's not attached to a legendary tv show that conveys prestige and import onto its guests would be severely reduced

otm. conan’s career is the best evidence of that

this all reminds me of that Seinfeld episode when Kramer had to fire Raquel Welch, and all of the talk about overseas markets and budget overruns is him doing the whole "Well, it seems that, uh, due to the vagaries of the production parameters, vis-à-vis the fragmenting of the audience due to cable television, carnivals, water parks" routine while "You don't don't use your arms when you tap-dance!" is "Trump!"

Does anyone enjoy those opening monologues? When I was in my early teens for some reason there was a NBC Europe broadcasting the Tonight Show and Late Night, and while it quickly became clear to me that Leno was lame and Conan was cool, the actual jokes in their monologues were almost identically hack shit - when Conan was nevertheless funny it was because he was mocking the jokes or veering off into clownish tangents.

Meyers is the best at this right now. He’s good at mocking his own jokes, and he dispenses with the traditional monologue quickly and then gets into the more biting “Closer Look” stuff.

Colbert and Kimmel are sort of the inverse. Their monologues feel required to be 8 minutes of Trump jokes before they eventually segue to another segment that allows them to talk about other things. I don’t have a problem with them like others itt do—I watch Colbert nearly every night—but I agree there’s nothing too innovative happening here.

I agree both Kimmel and Colbert are best when they're not talking about Trump but I think Kimmel is better at it because he's got so much contempt for the guy and I think his more lowbrow style matches a more lowbrow administration. Colbert seems a bit too nice

If he’s not doing an extremely mainstream daily show, i would imagine Colbert could be uniquely biting

I do genuinely look forward to what he ends up doing next

He's already done Broadway, hasn't he?

He works best when he’s doing a character.

Though I guess that #cancelcolbert campaign finally succeeded

He could definitely do the touring circuit that Steve Martin + Martin Short and David Sedaris do. I could see him taking that route more than Letterman or Conan did.

A far-right classmate I disassociated with in 2016 used to claim Colbert was racist for reasons I don’t remember (something to do with Ted Cruz who she had no problem with) and seemed to get infuriated pretty easily by him. Obviously quite a few nuts felt the same, which is one reason I’m sorry to see the show end.

I always thought it was funny that people get so incensed by Colbert, I'm pretty sure he's personally shoehorned prog references into some of the scripts, he's a bona fide dork. score one for us guys I guess

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncOCu2ErLe4

I always thought it was funny that people get so incensed by Colbert, I'm pretty sure he's personally shoehorned prog references into some of the scripts, he's a bona fide dork. score one for us guys I guess

― frogbs

greatest ally since Sherman Helmsley

imagine living in a grey future dystopia where merest mention of hocus pocus by focus is taboo

sir, you may take my ludicrously fast dutch yodeling from me when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. god. what would dutch yodeling _feel_ like to the touch? wait, hold on, i have synesthesia, i can answer that. cold, clammy, greasy. wow, i mean, i love listening to hocus pocus by focus but it feels kind of gross to the touch.

the funny thing is that looking at thijs van leer feels like touching grass. fresh, new-mown grass. peat and dew. yeah, i wasn't expecting that either. life. life is full of mysteries.

With that in mind, who came up with "heavy metal goes to college"? They used that line in a Late Show/Colbert sketch while discussing King Crimson, but I forgot it was actually in John Sayles's Return of the Secaucus Seven (applied to prog in general, including Crimson)...however, there was something about the delivery that made it seem like the character in the film was repeating some common belief. Was that something people said in the '70s?

Jon Stewart went pretty nuclear on CBS for this last night

Colbert said last night that CBS wouldn't let him broadcast an interview with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico: https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/stephen-colbert-cbs-blocked-james-talarico-interview-fcc-equal-time-1236665220/

Talarico is Brazilian slang for a dude who's into married or committed women. A bit like Jody Ryder in the old R&B songs.

I am unsure as to the relevance here but you never know.

Trying to play the "Equal Time" card during primary season is bullshit. Technically Talerico is just running against Jasmine Crockett at the moment, and I imagine CBS would just <love> having her on air again.

https://variety.com/2026/tv/news/cbs-byron-allen-late-night-stephen-colbert-comics-unleashed-1236709162/

CBS sells both late night time slots to Byron Allen

I guess they're basically turning back the clock - IIRC Arsenio's show was airing on CBS affiliates via the same way, and when he was poised to dominate late night in the wake of Leno's takeover of the Tonight Show, he instead lost his 11:30 ET/10:30 CT slot to Letterman and the newly created Late Show.

Arsenio aired on our Fox affiliate, but I guess it was different from market to market.

Comics Unleashed is no better than infomercials.

yeah Arsenio was syndicated so his show aired on different channels (and times) in different markets, but a lot of them were CBS stations that all switched to Letterman

IIRC Arsenio's show was airing on CBS affiliates via the same way

No. Byron Allen’s model here is buying the airtime outright and airing literally two-decade-old spakfilla in order to sell adspace. Comics Unleashed shoots new episodes once every ten years and adds them to the rotation: amortising the already-low production costs down to functionally zero. (He only made the third season after McDonalds settled a $10B nuisance lawsuit by agreeing to buy ads…)

The game show is a nightmare. Adam Carolla fake laughing at Jon Lovitz riffing with Jamie Kennedy.

Shocked me that the Hollywood Squares reboot isn’t any better so maybe I just hate comedy.

(watches two pieces of dogshit) “do I hate good things?”

Yeah, I didn't realize how crappy Allen's show really was. This really is fucking insane - Ellisons are totally fine bleeding loads of money just so Bari Weiss can destroy CBS News (not to mention their credibility), but they threw away the #1 show in late night for this shit.

(#1 for the time slot that is, but shows airing earlier shouldn't count.)

Two really nice performances in the past week of songs the artists recorded a half-century ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ca3VI4aGDjc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrV6sMUeiSg

Conan mentioned in his interview with Arsenio that he got to weather the tough early years at Late Night due to his demo. If he wasn't doing well with 18-35s, he would've been yanked.

Of everyone currently on the air in late night, I'd guess Fallon still wins that demo, but maybe it's Stephen? Either way, the entire pie is only a fraction of the size it was in 1993.

Occasionally the youtube autoplays autoplays a Colbert monologue while I’m in the kitchen and I can’t imagine anyone under 65 who has not been kicked in the head by a horse choosing to watch it for humour

Yeah idk his Comedy Central run was all time but of what little I’ve watched of the late night bros he (shockingly tbh) ended up being my least fave, besides that dipshit Fallon. Hard to watch.

Earnest late-night TV is the fucking worst. I miss Craig Ferguson.

new episodes once every ten years and adds them to the rotation: amortising

apparently the ep order for 2025-26 was 132. so for 33 weeks from September, 4/10ths of the episodes aired have been new, and from sometime in May it will be ten repeats a week.

The first time Allen bought time on CBS, he was not only scabbing during the writers strike, he was airing a similar ratio of “new” episodes, but that had been recorded seven years previously.