Christina Murphy
Columnist
A staggering 6.55 million people tuned in Tuesday night to watch Stephen Colbert high-kick his way onto the main stage of the Ed Sullivan Theater as host of “The Late Show.”
To put this number in perspective, his timeslot competitors Jimmy Fallon and Jimmy Kimmel received 2.9 million and 1.75 million viewers, respectively, an average Tuesday night for them.
Colbert is known to most for playing a narcissistic conservative pundit on his long-running Comedy Central political talk show, “The Colbert Report.” However, he steps away from this character on “The Late Show.”
In the show’s first monologue, Colbert emerged on stage bathing in the glowing blue light emitting from his overwhelmingly busy set, presenting himself as himself for the first time.
Colbert’s “Late Show” attempts to be the anti-late-night-talk-show late night talk show. Colbert has the wry sense of humor of a political satirist and the showmanship of a performer; making him the dream host that late night programming has been missing.
His house band Stay Human, led by Jon Batiste are an eclectic group of musicians who fuse classic New Orleans street jazz with modern hip-hop. Batiste is a very energetic bandleader. He dances around stage playing his melodica while energizing the crowd.
Colbert has always been a satirical voice in politics, and this is the voice that he’s now bringing to late night.
Within his first episode we watch Colbert doing his own announcements, breaking traditional “Late Show” form. He then introduces the audience to a demonic being to whom he sold his soul in exchange for the show. The demon’s only request being that he mentions Sabre Hummus, the show’s sponsor, obviously digging at other late night shows’ sometimes absurdly shameless methods for plugging sponsors.
He then does a bit where he equates Donald Trump coverage, a topic every late-night show has had a field day with this summer, to gorging himself on a package of Oreos.
He vows to not give his show any Trump air time, although by the end of the bit he has downed two packages of Oreos and devoted an entire segment to clips of Trump saying ridiculous things at campaign events. Who can’t relate to that?
Colbert’s first guest was George Clooney. In their interview Colbert doesn’t pretend that they are old pals catching up, but rather reminds the audience that Clooney is a celebrity on a talk show.
His second guest was Republican Presidential nominee Jeb Bush. It was a surprisingly humanizing interview for Bush, which is not to say that Colbert let him off easy. He presses him on his polices as Governor of Florida and asked him about his campaign logo. As much as Colbert tries to be the satirical voice of late night, the show can’t seem to fight it’s own nature – it is irrefutably a late-night talk show.
The new “Late Show” still consists of a white man wearing a suit and telling half-incubated jokes to you. There are two more guests who engage in banter with the host and there is a musical performance to close it out. In a time where any form of entertainment is accessible at your fingertips, is this enough to be the last thing someone watches before they close their eyes for the night? The answer is, not really. If an episode of late night television doesn’t have something that can be repackaged as a digital clip and passed around the Internet the next day, the show will fade into oblivion.
Since Fallon’s take-over of “The Tonight Show” in February, he has dominated both on television and in the digital space the next day. Fallon’s sketch comedy background has allowed him to create concise clips that feature beloved celebrities doing wacky things – making it Facebook sharing gold.
Fallon and Colbert have always had a friendly rivalry. Fallon himself made two cameo appearances in Colbert’s first episode. Hopefully this competition will drive innovation into late night and force everyone to rethink the traditional format.