SummaryStephen Colbert moves from his satirical late night show, "The Colbert Report" to take over David Letterman's seat at the long-running CBS late night talk show.
SummaryStephen Colbert moves from his satirical late night show, "The Colbert Report" to take over David Letterman's seat at the long-running CBS late night talk show.
Colbert is on his quest to find his authentic self. Thankfully, so far it's fun to watch. Can it be what America needs, to process the day's events? Late Show now, officially, feels like a real option.
Overall, this was a good start.... The show was rushed, the commercialism troubling, the interviews a mixed bag. But no one looks for perfection the first night--just signs, and they were mostly positive Tuesday.
Colbert’s first episode generally stuck to late-night conventions--the monologue, banter from behind a desk, interviews, and band were all present and accounted for--but it tweaked and teased them in heartening ways, especially for a debut. The show looked and felt like late night, but a more wild, antic, theatrical version, especially once Colbert got off his feet and got behind that desk.
He was overeager, a tad hyper, and trying to do too many things at once. But after a bumpy start, Colbert seemed to gain in confidence as the show wore on.
He'll need to relax a bit: As you might expect, given the stakes and the hype, he seemed a bit over-caffeinated. But calm will almost certainly come with time.... Colbert's chat with Clooney felt oddly stilted, with uncertain transitions from serious topics to prearranged comedy. He actually seemed more at ease with his second guest, Governor Bush.
The monologue had some fairly tired jokes about being at CBS (even the bit where Les Moonves kept switching the telecast over to "Mentalist" scenes evoked Conan O'Brien's old "Walker Texas Ranger" Lever gag), both Colbert and George Clooney struggled to feign interest in their interview, and even the livelier conversation with Jeb Bush suffered from being so heavily edited.... His take on the format wasn't boring--the opening credits, which made Manhattan look like the world's largest dollhouse, and the music of Jon Batiste and Stay Human, were both marvelous--but nor was it exciting enough to make me set a season pass for the kind of show I long since lost interest in.
I used to find Stephen Colbert incredibly funny, especially back in his Comedy Central days with The Colbert Report. Watching it with my dad, along with The Daily Show, was a blast and a great memory. Obviously, it was a parody show, and it thrived on its own clever humor. However, ever since the rise of Trump, it feels like Stephen has been so affected by what people call "Trump Derangement Syndrome" that the show just turned into a kind of anti-Trump propaganda machine. Even South Park has seemed to follow in some of these footsteps lately.I genuinely wish the best for Colbert, but the show doesn't feel funny anymore. It doesn't even really have jokes; it just pushes whatever the current left-leaning narrative is. The COVID vaccination episodes really stood out to me as being particularly absurd. And calling the president a "c*ck holster for Russia" or covering up for Biden's mental decline just feels more like partisan cheerleading than **** short, it's a sad fall from grace for someone who used to be one of the funniest men on TV. Now, in my view, he's become the very sort of mouthpiece for the left that he once accused others of being for the right. It's disappointing to see.