As I tell CTV News Channel anchor Marcia McMillan (see below for clip), this week’s ouster of Stephen Colbert and The Late Show feels like the beginning of the end for late night televison as we know it.
For over seventy years dating back to the premiere of Steve Allen’s original Tonight Show on NBC in the mid-’50s, North Americans have gone to bed with a guy behind a desk next to a couch and his guests. One big difference of late, however, was what was on view. It used to be audiences tucked into Tonight and others to escape the day’s headlines. During the Trump years in the White House, Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jon Stewart and others were where many got their news, distilled through a steady stream of comic outrage.
Not that Colbert and others chose to get in the business of mocking political leaders. As democratic principles began to unravel, they stepped into a void of critical opposition as congress and senators, judges and network news divisions were targeted, ridiculed, harnessed, cowed and dismissed — dismantled almost overnight like the former White House West Wing.
In November of 2015, just two months into Colbert’s 11 season run on The Late Show, I traveled to Manhattan and attended a taping at the Ed Sullivan Theater. This temple of television on Broadway will lock its doors after this Thursday’s final show and who knows what will come next. So much took place under its roof, all witnessed by live studio audiences: the earliest episodes of The Honeymooners; tapings of What’s My Line?: The Beatles and Elvis on The Ed Sullivan Show; David Letterman’s long run as the original host of The Late Show. It was very cool to line up and enter this now ninety nine-year-old building, past a portrait of Sullivan in the outer hall, and enter Colbert’s beautifully restored playpen. A large, stain glass windowed dome, hidden for many years, crowned the auditorium from high above, so vibrant in colour that it looked projected. Take the set tour below, taped as a recent visit from Architectural Digest magazine.
Colbert’s isn’t the only Late Show to get a shameful shut down. The day after Letterman’s exit in May of 2015, the cool Manhattan landscape of bridges and iconic skyline towers that stood behind his desk was junked and trashed outside in a dumpster. Everything should have gone straight to the National Comedy Center in Jamestown, NY — had it existed then. (It opened three years later.)
Even when CBS was still CBS, legacy wasn’t important. Now that is is overwhelmed by this Paramount/Skydance-Warners/Discovery merger, well, as Letterman said in paraphrasing Edward R. Murrow, goodnight and good luck.
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Last week’s guest appearance by Letterman and, prior to that, the return of “Strike Force Five” colleagues Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon, Seth Meyers, and John Oliver will likely be seen as the real finale to the Colbert years. The giddy return to the roof and the heaving of chairs and watermellons to the streets below was that cathartic slice of anarchy you didn’t know you were desperately needing.
The final week kicked off Monday with special guests Paul Shaffer (Letterman’s Canadian-born bandleader) and Michael Keaton in a chicken suit. Ahead this week lies appearances by Bruce Springsteen, Stephen Spielberg (who has a movie to plug), Colbert’s old Daily Show boss Jon Stewart, David Byrne and others. Thursday’s final guest has not yet been identified. Yes, Colbert did invite the Pope. In the old days, Letterman would have introduced his Holiness, and Larry “Bud” Melman would have walked out in white robes and a mitre.
Colbert is also expected to finally give his own answers to the Colbert Questionaire. Guessing he will pick apples over oranges, dogs over cats. That number he’s thinking of but kept to himself all these years? My money is on -30-.
