"The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" thread.

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CBS should really be flooding the internet with viral clips of a couple of female septuagenarians kissing a middle aged white dude to get the kids excited about watching the show!

 

For an older woman Helen Mirren is still hot!

 

Jon Batiste is a man of few words. Does not contribute verbally in any way whatsoever. But, the band is great & I think they have the best theme song of all the late night shows. What're you gonna do?

 

I did that for several weeks and then decided to delete my series pass to the show. Even though I loved Colbert on Strangers with Candy, The Daily Show, and The Colbert Report, I generally wasn't enjoying his opening monologues. The vast majority of the time, I wasn't interested in his guests. The vast majority of the time, I wasn't interested in his musical guests. I finally asked myself why I was even wasting an hour per week fast forwarding through five episodes of his show every week.

 

The band is good but they seem kind of one-dimensional to me. All "New Orleans" all the time is getting old.

 

Have you checked your house for radon lately?

 

I saw the Late Show with Stephen Colbert as an experiment to see which is stronger- the sharp, brilliant wit and talent of one of our premier comedic minds, or the bland celebrity and network commercial banality of late night television.

The answer is... the latter.

 

I'm really not sure which of the these that I'm more bored with …

Colbert's stupid opening hug every night (and occasional high in the sky "kick"), with that beyond boring bandleader.

Conan's equally stupid "string dance"

or

Fallon's repetitive opening lines after he hits the stage, "That's what I'm talking about" or "Now that's a New York Audience"

Each of these tired and overdone things, are done each and every night on these shows and when I see any of them, it immediately screams "BORING", which I highly doubt that any of them are going for?

 

Did anyone else see this the other night? It's the LA Philharmonic playing Fanfare for the Common Man.

 

I expected it to turn into this:

 

Cartoon trump = gold

 

Well, looks like the network is going to reel Colbert in... Chris Licht from CBS This Morning is being brought in as "executive producer" to take the running of the show out of Colbert's hands. Carpool Karaoke here we come...

D.D.

 

He worked on CBS This Morning and made it a news-heavy alternative to Today. Given The Late Show's news bent, I really think that's the last thing that'll happen with this change.

 

The ratings aren't where the network want to see them but up to this point, Colbert has been left alone for the most part, largely running his own show. That's about to end. The direction shift is apparently going to make the show more social media-friendly with an eye to more potentially-viral bits and with less emphasis on Colbert as the be-all and end-all. I'm expecting this to go more Jimmy Fallon than Charlie Rose.

D.D.

 

Do you have anything other than your own speculation to back this up? I mean, we know about the new producer, but the rest of it seems to just be your interpretation of why the move was made.

 

As a matter of fact I do, Steven- I mean Sean. His ratings are pretty much even with Jimmy Kimmel most nights - this does not delight the suits at CBS. A couple of analysts quoted in a recent AP article discussed the fact that Colbert has basically been running the whole enterprise to this point and the network is bringing in Licht and created a position for him as "executive producer" to take the helm and change this. The expectation is that the focus will be on aiming to do more bits with potential to go viral and to rely on people other than Colbert to provide more for people to see besides Colbert. It's being described as a "major tweak". If there is any speculation here, it's not mine. Why do you think they're making this move ? Sheer joy in what he's achieved to this point ? He was suppposed to be competing for the late-night crown, not a participation ribbon. There's going to be some changes ... Anyone who thought Colbert was going to change late-night is about to watch something quite the opposite, I fear.

D.D.

 

Something has to change....his show is unwatchable. Seems so forced and fake I can't get through more than a few minutes.

 

I read a bunch of articles about the move, including the AP one you referenced, and it all sounds like fairly reasonable stuff to me. I'm sure CBS is putting the best spin on it to not embarrass the expensive talent that they are heavily invested in, but I wouldn't call this a sign of desperation or panic. They gave Stephen seven months to run things the way they had agreed -- more time than Conan got at The Tonight Show, incidentally -- and now they'd like to "tweak" the show to improve the product and of course the ratings. For what it's worth, and I don't think it's a tiny distinction, the person quoted in the article called it a "pretty big" tweak, not a "major" one.

You say you didn't speculate in your post, but you did -- when you said "I'm expecting this to go more Jimmy Fallon than Charlie Rose." Personally -- and I guess this is MY speculation -- I seriously doubt that CBS would (a) try to turn their revered, intelligent host into a giggling, viral-chasing Fallon wannabe; or (b) bring in a showrunner with an almost exclusively news-heavy background in order to turn Colbert into said giggling Fallon wannabe. Stephen was hired entirely on the strength of his political humor; strip him of that and he's not the guy they hired anymore. I think they simply want the show to be tighter, funnier and more memorable -- all of which would hopefully lead to better ratings and more online success. I don't think this is a repudiation of Colbert's persona or the show he's put on the air so far.

And no, of course I'm not Stephen -- but that was hi-LAR-ious when you confused me with him. Good stuff.

S.M.

 

That's a lot of spin you've dished up there. How this can be viewed as anything but a repudiation when he's getting his leash yanked on in this fashion is beyond me. I also think that , network TV not exactly being a bastion of innovation, they are absolutely going to make The Late Show a more "traditional" offering. We'll see how this all plays out soon enough.

I don't think that Colbert was hired "entirely on the strength of his political humor" because I don't think that the late-night audience wants a steady diet of that in the view of the networks. CBS isn't Comedy Central. Too much potential to be off-putting to a segment of his potential audience.. I also don't think that's all he's got - he's more rounded than that. That's always been the buzz around him. I also think that it's an extremely difficult situation - the new show is too "safe" for Colbert's original audience, the one that "revered" him, myself included. I don't see them adding a whole pile of new viewers to the equation so they're going to have to attract viewers from the other existing late-night franchises. To do that, they're likely going to have to give those potential viewers something they already evidently want to watch and if that was The Late Show's current format, they's be watching it now. If we're speculating, I speculate that we can expect to see more "singing and dancing Stephen" and more "celebrity-schmoozing Stephen" and less "political satire Stephen" - they won't have Trump to kick around forever and then what ?

My personal opinion ? I don't think CBS knows quite what to do with Stephen Colbert but this latest initiative shows that they don't think he does, either. So they're going to start monkeying with it and I don't see this ending well for Colbert fans.

D.D.

 

With a seemingly saturated collection of predictable late-night talk shows,
I wonder what kind of ratings "The Colbert Report" would get on CBS.
Sure, they would likely alienate much of the conservative demographic,
but then they might pick up a nice boost across various younger demographics.

 

I'm not dishing up ANY "spin" -- that would imply that I have a vested interest in which way this goes, or how it's interpreted, and I don't. I was never a particularly big fan of The Colbert Report, and I don't really care about the future of his present show, other than I respect the guy and I'd like to see him continue to provide a more intelligent alternative in late night to Fallon. But you seem to want to see this as a repudiation of the first 7 months of Colbert's Late Show, and a network "leash-yanking," and I'm just saying that isn't necessarily the entire story. Most shows on late night get tweaked or re-tooled over time, and not all network directives are "meddling" or bad. Colbert developed a very popular TV persona on Comedy Central, where he had the luxury of low basic cable expectations. But he's had to drop everything that made the Colbert Report successful -- everything but his name and his intelligence and humor -- and re-build a new show from scratch. Not so easy to do, especially on network TV, where a million viewers isn't terrific anymore, it's terrible.

Another thing that Colbert and CBS have to deal with is the fact that late night is an old genre now, arguably in decline, at least in terms of live viewers. How many classic "bits" are left in the universe that haven't been done before? Seth Meyers re-tooled his show a few months ago, and the "fresh idea" was to turn the monologue into his old Weekend Update routine. Stephen is struggling to develop a new signature bit that will give viewers a clear sense of who he IS as an 11:30 network persona. I don't think CBS particularly cares about whether it's got a political/intelligent tilt or a pop culture/schmoozy tilt -- they just want it to be FUNNY. And again, they didn't bring in a pop culture guy to be the showrunner; they brought in a guy with a background in news shows. So I think they want to let Stephen be Stephen -- but they want it to be funny and they want to make more money. The good news is that the show is already more profitable than Dave's was in its final years, because it's much cheaper to produce. But they certainly were hoping that Colbert would improve on Dave's ratings, and so far he hasn't.

 

Artie should be the show's producer.

 

It's worth noting that everything in that AP article (aside from the factual reporting about Colbert's ratings and the appointment of Licht) is speculation. The article quotes heavily from Robert Thompson, who has no insider knowledge but is simply the "director of Syracuse University's Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture." The comments about specifically how the show will change (which you repeat above), and the notion that it will be a "major tweak" are his opinions, and they do not appear to be derived from anything aside from guesswork. I'm not saying he's wrong, but he doesn't know any more than we do. It stands to reason CBS wants the show changed and the ratings to improve, but how that will manifest itself remains to be seen. I tend to agree with blogger Mark Evanier's opinions... the show would be better if it were less heavily scripted and more spontaneous, and if it deviated more from the bland, cliched talk show format.