Review of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (2015)
Seen in 2026.
I’ve seen select portions of the Youtube feed: Mainly the monologues.
It’s the Late Show with David Letterman but with Stephen Colbert, no longer playing the character he did in The Colbert Report (2005).
I watched some Letterman as a kid. It improved my English, if nothing else. Colbert honoured the man’s legacy, in a darker time.
In 2026, a year into the second Trump presidency, the FCC barred The Late Show with Stephen Colbert from airing an interview with politician James Talarico, citing the equal-time rule. I doubt Trump would have done that to Letterman. It’s a testament to the way that The Daily Show (1996), more than twenty years earlier, reshaped comedy for the counterculture. Presumably, the same anti-free-speech politics were a factor in Colbert’s cancellation later that year.
References here: The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad (1949), The Daily Show (1996), Mythbusters (2003), Mad Max: Fury Road (2015), Hypernormalisation (2016).