This is absolutely true. I used to love “This Week in God.”
My main concern is over the late night format itself, and the fact that a show needs to attract a far larger audience to be considered successful on network TV than on a cable station like Comedy Central.
Yeah, that’s it. I think news media is spiraling out of control - on both sides of the political game (and non-political stuff) - and The Daily Show plus The Colbert Report are very important for everyone to be able to keep things in check. Losing half of that will be bad.
However, if they can find a suitable replacement, it would be a much better balance with losing Colbert outright.
I like John Oliver as a replacement. With his own news show, of course, not as a fake conservative. His podcast The Bugle is great, and wouldn’t mind seeing Andy coming with him to TV. But it would make for a very left-leaning hour, as opposed to the current “news” hour on Comedy Central which is nicely balanced.
I am afraid this might be true. But it may just be that I haven’t seen Colbert in the right context before.
For me the problem is that to be a late night host, you have to be good at playing yourself. I don’t mean “being yourself” (I don’t pretend that these guys’ talk show host personae are direct presentations of their normal everyday selves…) but rather, “playing yourself,” i.e. performing in a way such that the audience is relating to you as though they were relating to a person occupying your body and not a character your body is being made to imitate.
I think this is why it’s so common to move from stand-up to late night. And even Fallon, though I don’t know that he did stand-up, was best known on SNL for breaking character (i.e. playing himself!) and for the news segments where he was just “being Jimmy Fallon.”)
But I don’t think I’ve ever seen Colbert do this. It’s not that I know that he can’t (I have no way of knowing whether he can or can’t), it’s that everything he does involves him playing a character rather than himself. And he has always (in what I’ve seen him in, i.e. TDS, TCR, and Strangers with Candy most prominently come to mind) played characters in this aggressively ironic mode, where you kind of see Colbert laughing at the character he’s playing, as he’s playing it.
For this reason it’s really hard for me to see Colbert as being able to play the kind of straightforwardness and sincerity that the late night talk show hosts put out on stage.
It may just be I haven’t seen him in the right performances. But what I’m afraid of is that my experience of Colbert matches most other peoples’ experience, and so no matter what he does on The Late Show, we’ll all find ourselves unable to see him as a late night talk show host just being himself.
But hey, even if I’m right about that, maybe he’ll make it work. Dude’s super clever.
Are you talking about TDS and TCR? You’re calling that balanced?!
Additional thought: Colbert does a half-hour (minus commercials) of mostly political- and social issue-themed shtick every night. We know he’s very good at this.
He now will be called upon to do one hour every night — and there’s no way he will be permitted or be able to do an hour’s worth of this shtick five nights a week.
So for a good portion of the time, he’ll have to do something else. So what’s involved is a leap of faith that he’ll be just as good doing that something else. Right now, this is quite unknown.
He will also have to appeal to a much broader audience (beyond those who are happy with nothing but political- and social issue-themed humor). A greater percentage of traditional late-night show viewers are uninterested in this type of humor, or at most want it only in small doses.
So again, Colbert will have to take a big step away from his comfort zone. It’s an open question as to whether he has what it takes to do this successfully.
I’m surprised if that’s true! Granted, I don’t watch Letterman, but I remember liking him for very similar reasons to those for which I like Colbert.
Colbert’s audience is highly politically astute and aware. The notion that someone turns the show off because it’s a musical guest is common, not an anomaly. People wait to get through the slow newsweek with Prescott Pharmaceuticals bits to get to the Better Know a District and similar.
So, are we going to get a watered down Colbert? One that makes Stupid Pet Tricks a corenerstone of his act now? Or is he going to alienate a large segment of the Letterman audience with commentary that requires a minimal pulse?
I think there are parallels to be drawn to Jon Stewart hosting the award show (whichever it was). He’s great on his show, and great for a particular segment, but in the general sense just didn’t quite cut it.
(But cynicism aside, wouldn’t it be great to get a 1-hour, unchanged, wider-format/bigger supported Colbert Show?!)
Younger people.
Why is “does more serious news” a point for Stewart? We’re discussing late night talk shows, not a news show. In fact I think this is one of the reasons Stewart doesn’t seem to have much interest in a network talk show: he’s shaped The Daily Show perfectly for himself and he can focus on the stuff that interests him, like financial market reform or compensation for September 11th rescue workers or the state of the Veterans’ Administration. He likes shooting the shit with his friends, but you can see he’s not all that interested in promoting movies. He would never be able to make a network talk show his own the way he has with TDS. You can make the same about Colbert and the Report, but everything on that show is filtered through the Colbert character. He may have some broader interests.
That’s not really how this works. His job is not to keep Letterman’s viewers and maintain the same ratings. It’s to attract enough desirable viewers to make the show worthwhile. I read on Twitter recently that around 30% of Colbert’s audience is under 30 compared to about 7% of Letterman’s (obviously larger) audience.
I’m skeptical that the network would be interested in this. I’d watch, but I’d also pity a writing staff that had to come up with 45 minutes of new stuff every night.
That assumes the formula has to be altered a great deal to let him shine. Does it?
I’m quite sad about this. I have no doubt he’ll do well. He’s an incredible talent in so many areas. But I enjoyed having TCR as much for being a force for satire as for entertainment. TDS and TCR are the only 2 shows I watch religiously, primarily because of the political satire element. Over the years I’ve enjoyed Dave and Conan and Jimmy Fallon and others here and there. But I can’t say I’ve had any interest in the late night talk show format for awhile now (beyond the occasional viral clip that circulates on FB). It blows my mind how consistently good TDS and TCR have been for so long.
It’s good news for SC. He’ll be making a shit ton more money and doing his thing for a much much bigger audience. But something very special will be lost, and I don’t think replaced.
There are definitely concerns that Colbert is going to be playing a character into being himself and that is quite a change. Though ironic detachment has been a Letterman staple, so maybe it won’t be that much of a shift as we think it might - no ‘character’, but keeping the ironic POV. Also, I think that he can pull some of the stuff into Late Night with him as opposed to changing it all up. “Better Know A District” for one is something that I can see as being on a Late Night program.
However, he likely will move slightly away from the political theme of Colbert Report. Whether or not that works is up for question, but I’m hopefully optimistic.
Did they at least offer it to Craig Ferguson before giving it to Colbert?
I’m on board. Stephen does pure goofy very well–see the “Get Lucky” segment during the aborted Daft Punk episode. But I think the best parts of his “persona” (especially lately) are the ones that are the least over the top, and he’s at his best when some sincerity pokes through.
A while back he made an appearance on Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast, doing one of their Cocktail Chatter segments. He wasn’t being funny at all; he was talking about something he had read about Richard Nixon and how it reminded him that even though history remembers him for the Watergate campaign shenanigans, he really was responsible for some pretty awful things. Colbert was completely engaging there, and I think I like him better when he’s being totally sincere than in sarcastic persona mode.
If anything I worry that it’ll be like mixing Pappy van Winkle with ginger ale. Will it be a truly awesome bourbon and ginger? Of course. But it will also obscure a lot of what makes Pappy so great.
I’d like to see Samantha Bee get a shot at 11:30, but I don’t know that she can carry 30 minutes a night the way Colbert does.
Here’s an interesting part of an interview between Colbert and Peter Sagal. At the end he talks about the limitations of his character: he notes that because his character is so closed-minded and ignorant, he never gets to express admiration or appreciation for guests he really likes or enthusiasm about their subjects. I actually think that over the years that sincere appreciation has started to leak into his interviews more often because it’s so hard to maintain that distance all the time. On The Late Show he won’t be restrained that way.
I think so. The weakest part of Colbert was always the interviews, particularly when the guests are in the entertainment business. There are certain interviews where he plainly does not give a shit, and even when he does they’re often pretty weak. And that’s usually 30-40 minutes of these shows. So either they’ll have to dramatically cut back on the interviews, or Colbert is going to have to somehow up his game.
As I understand it, Ferguson had a “Prince of Wales” clause in his contract but he has repeatedly said that he’s not interested in moving to 11:30.
Right of first refusal was allegedly part of Ferguson’s contract but word was that he didn’t want the gig (he likes what he has going on already), and even if he did I’m sure CBS would have bought him out.
People thinking Colbert can only function as a fake right-wing pundit must not have ever watched the excellent Amy Sedaris series “Strangers with Candy.” Look at his range!!!
I think it’s a good move for both sides really. I doubt they’ll stifle him, after watching Letterman kick ass, in that time slot, being his weird and wonderful self.
I like Colbert, he’s smart and funny. But one thing I’m hoping changes is often times the monologue involved too much shouting for me. Personally I don’t care for that. When overused, it gets very tiresome, very quickly!
I think a lot of that is because he has to interview people while in character. That’s even tougher with entertainment business guests, where there isn’t as much room for snark. As a conservative commentator, of course he isn’t going to give a shit about entertainment folk. When he has freedom to interview guests as himself, I think it will be quite different.
I’m really going to miss “The Colbert Report.” The 11:35 network time slot is going to be a real bear for competition (against Fallon & Kimmel) and we all know that Stephen doesn’t like bears. 
I wonder who’s going to be Colbert’s house band? Paul Shaffer and the CBS orchestra are leaving with Letterman, of course.
Letterman hasn’t said when he is leaving, but Comedy Central said they look forward to “the next eight months” of The Colbert Report. So I guess it will go off the air at the end of this year. I’m guessing he’ll drop character to thank everybody at the end of the last one.