The final “Late Show” episode ever tried to just be a normal “Late Show” episode, until it couldn’t.
Host Stephen Colbert — in an impossible position since his firing was announced last July, nearly a year before his final episode was to air — creditably did a full-jokes monologue, and then kept telling jokes at the desk. (Notably, he avoided mentioning President Trump, whose first-term rise to prominence fueled Colbert’s own success at CBS, and whose second-term quest for revenge may well have shut it down.) The funniest moment in the show’s first half was Colbert’s mentioning a lawsuit mounted by the composer of the famous “Peanuts” music, after which his band picked up the “Linus and Lucy” theme, as if to threaten a lawsuit against CBS. It was a very funny bit! Colbert’s firing is unfair, and he is right to have some fun.
But Colbert couldn’t, ultimately, escape being Colbert as the episode wore on, and the final program sadly proved the case for his show’s obsolescence. Unfortunately, this host is gifted at neither interview nor sketch. In the former, he talked over Paul McCartney — a well-chosen guest, given his connection, as a Beatle, to the Ed Sullivan Theater — relentlessly. In one particularly inartful moment, Colbert attempted to pull rank on McCartney by asking if he’d ever met the Pope. (McCartney hadn’t; Colbert had, which is why he asked — to brag about it. But then, McCartney is a Beatle.) This called back a strange and underdone bit in which an actor playing Pope Leo said the hot dogs in the Ed Sullivan Theater didn’t meet his rider, and shook his fist from behind a dressing-room door.
Given almost a year’s worth of advance notice, one might think Colbert might have come up with better material. Particularly baffling was the disastrous taped sketch about a wormhole consuming his studio that took up the better part of the show’s second half. (Notionally, this was political, in the sense that we were informed it represented the paradox that a top-rated show could be canceled; it was also, fittingly, a total time-suck.) Colbert’s colleagues in late night — every major host, from Kimmel to Fallon to Meyers, showed up — deserve credit for showing up for whatever he’d do for his last show, but “whatever” is the operative term. I wish they’d gotten something more to do. If this was, as it seems, an attempt to strike back at CBS — I hate to say it, but the network won.
Similarly, I felt confused that Colbert appeared as a backup vocalist in the series-closing McCartney performance of “Hello, Goodbye” — what is his presence onstage adding, besides the fact that we get more of someone who’s been thanked, extensively and effusively, for a year or so? Colbert had also danced alongside David Byrne in the final week of “The Late Show.” Perhaps the recessiveness of Colbert’s “Late Show” predecessor David Letterman — a host who’d seemingly rather die than perfom repeatedly with musical guests — but something seems to have been lost well before “The Late Show” itself was canceled.
I’ve written before that Colbert’s “Late Show” endgame has seemed to reveal the host as not without a healthy sense of ego, as the production has allowed guest after guest to pay tribute to Colbert’s service to democracy and the wider world. (That McCartney seemed eager to discuss his own music career seems to have thrown Colbert, accustomed, perhaps, to a different tone from his guests.) In Trump’s first term and the early going of his second, the show provided meaningful solace to an audience not sure where to turn; in recent months, it’s become about how cool it is that it had once done that. That the show made people feel good is a good thing. With that acknowledged, it would be OK to move on. Colbert will keep dancing — maybe on another network or streaming service. And perhaps a period of coming down to Earth will temper his comedy, and make it more consistently like the joke-dense monologue we all know he can do with ease and less like the wormhole.
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