When a celebrity stops by The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, they aren’t there to lip-synch to a pop song. Colbert’s approach has been marked, instead, by a sincerity that’s rare in the 11:35 p.m. block: He had Joe Biden on during the coronavirus pandemic to discuss how to handle grief, and a conversation with Dua Lipa about Colbert’s Catholic faith seemed to come out of nowhere, light but never flippant. Colbert, a veteran comedy performer, doesn’t always take himself so seriously, of course; he was just as eager to ask former First Lady Michelle Obama to do an impression of her husband, Barack, and was delighted to hear the actor Saoirse Ronan speak in her native Irish accent.
Colbert has never been shy about his intellectual bent. Whereas The Late Show’s prior steward, David Letterman, was happier to playfully bicker with guests, his successor took a surprisingly heady path. It ended up being the right one to chart: a calming counterbalance to Jimmy Fallon’s bite-size-clip harvesting and the more pointed political work being done by his peers Jon Stewart, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver.
Colbert has sprinkled earnestness amid the gags since he took the reins of The Late Show more than 10 years ago. It’s a tack unlike any other in late night; it will be unmistakably lost when he departs on May 21—and missed by both his viewers and his guests. When the filmmaker Christopher Nolan presented the trailer for his new blockbuster, The Odyssey, on the show earlier this month, for instance, his appearance was a rarity for the press-shy Oscar winner. Even more distinctive was Colbert’s eagerness to discuss the Homeric epic that Nolan was adapting: “I know you don’t do this very often—don’t do the late-night shows,” Colbert told him. “Only you, actually,” Nolan murmured in reply.
Last July, The Late Show’s network, CBS, announced that the program would end its run the following May; CBS called the decision a purely financial one in the face of changing viewer behavior. No doubt, watching TV live is becoming a thing of the past, and the glitzy nightly talk show that used to be a network cash cow has become a trickier economic proposition. But Colbert’s forced departure still raised many an eyebrow, given that CBS’s parent company, Paramount Skydance, had recently settled a lawsuit with President Trump over a 60 Minutes interview and was angling for government approval of a potential takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. The president has made it clear that he is no fan of Colbert, a frequent critic of his administration, and CBS seemed not to consider The Late Show valuable enough to defend it against any similar blowback.
[Read: Why CBS snatched its talk-show king’s crown]
The Late Show’s final season has been slightly odd and funereal, but that’s largely just indicative of what the TV landscape is about to lose. What other comedian on the air would be able to, mid-interview, remind his guest that the poet Ovid actually went by his middle name? (“There you go—you’re pulling rank again,” Nolan replied to Colbert’s correction, adding, “You don’t have to tell me, because I wouldn’t know what the hell you were saying.”) Colbert turned a program defined by Letterman’s penchant for snark into something quite estimable: the classiest broadcast in late night, whose host was unafraid to embrace playfulness or throw a sharp elbow at the White House when necessary.
The most intriguing thing about Colbert’s Late Show, though, has been the way that it didn’t challenge the form. For decades, late-night TV has introduced trailblazers trying to break, or reinvent, the staid routine of stand-up monologues and celebrity chitchat. In the 1980s, Letterman caustically rejected the schmoozy style of Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show with his follow-on program, Late Night. In the ’90s, when Letterman took that vibe to CBS to launch The Late Show, his replacement, Conan O’Brien, brought an anarchic, surreal approach that went on to influence a new generation of comedians. Colbert himself was the talk-show firebrand of the 2000s with The Colbert Report, where he metamorphosed the sharp political comedy of Stewart’s The Daily Show into a never-ending parody, a cable-news satire that doubled as a nightly piece of performance art.
When CBS hired Colbert, I worried that the host of such a distinctly arch comedy show would be an odd fit for a bigger, more mainstream brand. Indeed, his early months on The Late Show were rocky; Colbert seemed uncertain about simply being himself after playing a character for so long. He brought back his Colbert Report persona, had Stewart pop up in surprise gags, and generally struggled with how to differentiate himself while his time-slot mate, Fallon, pumped out goofy interviews and games at The Tonight Show that produced viral clips. In 2016, CBS foisted a showrunner on Colbert’s program to give it more structure; around the same time, The Late Show started to lean more heavily on political humor. Later, Colbert recalled that his producer (and old friend) Paul Dinello had encouraged him in that direction, despite his trepidation to do so amid what he called in a New York Times interview “increasingly contentious public discourse.” According to Colbert, Dinello argued that topical jokes are “the part the audience wants to see.”
[Read: David Letterman’s long shadow]
Dinello was right, and The Late Show eventually became late night’s ratings leader—a throne that CBS is now voluntarily abdicating. But although Colbert’s performance frequently involved taking jabs at Trump and making pleas for common decency in America’s politics, to me, these weren’t what defined his tenure on the show. The clips I revisit the most speak to his empathetic nature, which revealed itself more and more as The Late Show went on. Take his exchange with Keanu Reeves, in which he asked the actor, “What do you think happens when we die?” (as part of a rapid-fire series), and Reeves pondered and replied, “I know that the ones who love us will miss us.” This moment of sweet profundity would have felt more jarring on Letterman’s or O’Brien’s show, but Colbert expanded it as a recurring feature: an existential questionnaire to pose to other celebrity guests, searching for an insightful peek into their brain; it’s a much more tender version of a viral segment.
I would love to see Colbert lean into his wackier side again once he is free of CBS; he remains an incredibly agile improviser who loves to go down the silliest rabbit holes when prompted. (His podcast appearances are a great example of that—such as this hilariously complex tangent about commuting in Chicago.) Possibly, he’ll follow the same route that O’Brien and Letterman have taken—the former with his podcast, and the latter on Netflix—doing long-form interviews with famous people that are unbound by the strictures of network TV. Notably, however, the first post–Late Show project he’s announced is co-writing a movie in the Lord of the Rings universe—one of his deepest, nerdiest interests. Losing The Late Show will not diminish Colbert in the slightest, but it will diminish the medium of late-night TV, which enters its true twilight as a profitable source of entertainment for the masses.
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