... Stephen Colbert, and the swan song of The Late Show, including the return of Strike Force Five.
I’m not taking stock of the wider state of late-night TV, at least directly, right now.
My aim is to gather some of the most interesting coverage of and content related to Colbert’s exit from the 11 o’clock hour after nearly 30 years, dating back to his days as
a Daily Show correspondent, over 20 of them as a host and 10+ broadcasting from the Ed Sullivan Theater.
Hey! Stephen recently led a tour of the Sullivan’s auditorium for Architectural Digest [14:29]. Known as CBS Studio 50 when it housed Ed’s “rilly big shew” and built a century ago as Hammerstein’s Temple of Music by Arthur Hammerstein in honor of his father, it’s possessed — as Late Show viewers have seen — of such remarkable features as a majestic dome refurbished and retrofitted with deft, modern graphic elements by Colbert’s staff.
The above, like all further video links in this post, goes to YouTube.
One week after his 25-hour speech on the Senate floor began, Cory Booker spoke to Stephen Colbert on The Late Show with familiar eloquence.
“You and I are people of faith,” Booker told the host near the end of the conversation, “but there is a Civic Gospel in this country that we need more than ever.” He noted that the Declaration of Independence from a kingdom overseas was a declaration of interdependence among the people of this emerging nation as well. An extended version of the interview is now up on YouTube.
Here, appropriately enough for the day, is a labor of Questlove that opened his excellent documentary about Saturday Night Live’s musical legacy. You can watch the mashup montage directly in his Instagram post or as embedded a couple of paragraphs into an article on the NBC website. The entirety of Ladies and Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music re-airs tomorrow night, Feb. 15th, from 8 to 11 p.m. ET on the network and is streamable on Peacock.
John MacDonald is credited as editor of the montage, and Oz Rodríguez as co-
director on the special. Questlove’s 2021 doc Summer of Soul, about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, is for my money one of the best films of the decade, period, and not just because I hadn’t seen Marilyn McCoo in too long; you can watch it on Hulu.
Peacock debuted four 1-hour chapters of a documentary series marking Saturday
Night Live’s 50th in January, with a concert featuring many past musical guests streaming tonight. SNL’s entire catalog of nearly 1,000 episodes is on the service as well. The anniversary special is set to air live on NBC Sunday night, Feb. 16th, at 8 p.m. ET, preceded by a red-carpet show at 7.
Don’t sleep on Ladies and Gentlemen… even if you’re far more interested in SNL’s comedic heritage than its musical guests. Music as part of that comedic heritage is also deftly explored, from sketch jingles and The Lonely Island shorts to celebrity impressions and musicians as hosts.
Related: Mad Mix • Swift Kicks • My Other Saturday Notes
Need a laugh?
I’m conflicted. The dissonance of firing up the blog again, rooting on my Phillies, and hoping to get out for my birthday this weekend despite such unending pain existing half a globe away is acute. Yet I just passed an hour listening to Episode 5 of the podcast Strike Force Five while doing some graphics work for an upcoming project and the only reason I’m not incapacitated from cackling out loud nearly the entire time is that my asthma’s so bad I’ve kind-of unconsciously trained myself not to push out breath as I’m silently convulsing in hysterics.
Strike Force Five united late-night hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, Jimmy Fallon, and Seth Meyers in a series of highly candid, very lightly structured conversations, sponsored to bring in money for their staffs as the strike by the Writers’ Guild of America halted production of their programs. Twelve installments were released over six weeks.
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver was not on last week, but will be on tonight — and with John Oliver. What are the odds, I ask you?
If you’re looking forward to it then you might be interested in Oliver’s chat with Ari Velshi on the subject “The Rigors of Laughter” [38:58] from December. Velshi is a correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC who serves on the board of The Philadelphia Citizen, which presented the interview as part of a day of programming “that brings the most innovative urban thinkers and global thought leaders together to share and discuss bold ideas”. Although neither gentleman was quite sure how to interpret the conversation’s title, it focused on Last Week’s process and purpose.
There wasn’t much in their exchange I hadn’t already heard or read, and Oliver isn’t
as engrossingly hyper-articulate as fellow Daily Show alum Stephen Colbert when he’s questioned in such a setting, but it was still fun seeing Oliver express his delight over the absurd expenditures of time, money, and other resources that his staff concocts.
I’ll wager that most of you are familiar with James Corden’s Carpool Karaoke, a
— really, the — standout feature of his brief tenure as host of The Late Late Show on CBS. You’ve probably already seen its latest installment, in which Corden drives around Manhattan with Lin-Manuel Miranda, Audra MacDonald, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Jane Krakowski. So you don’t need me to link to it.
But I just did anyway.
One tiny spoiler for Ant-Man coming up after this odd image…
Welcome to one among thousands of posts about David Letterman’s last day in
late night.
I had a typically punnish title ready to go before realizing that the survey of my
favorite things begun here for my 40th birthday hadn’t been updated in over a year.
A click on Dave’s name in the labels below will show that his brand of television, unsurprisingly, merits the designation.
I praised the pleasant surprise that was John Oliver’s hosting of The Daily Show
when Jon Stewart took a sabbatical last summer. And I was not alone. Many TV critics predicted that Oliver would be promoted from correspondent to host of his own show — probably someplace other than Comedy Central, since a third half-hour* of satirical news and punditry there wasn’t likely. That someplace turned out to be HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.
John Oliver wasn’t the sole member of Comedy Central’s late-night team giving
us process junkies a peek behind the curtain in the past couple of weeks. Stephen Colbert was interviewed by Paul Mercurio, who does warm-up for The Colbert Report, over nearly an hour on a variety of topics — but mostly about the Daft Punk fiasco. You can listen to the podcast free.
Daft Punk, scheduled to be on Colbert’s show earlier this month, bowed out and/or
was yanked over misunderstandings and Viacom internal politics due to the mysterious French faux-robots’ upcoming special appearance at last weekend’s MTV Video Music Awards telecast.
Jon Stewart will return to The Daily Show next week following a sabbatical. He
was in the Middle East this summer directing a film called Rosewater. For the eight weeks out of twelve after Stewart’s departure that the show was not on hiatus, writer/correspondent John Oliver stepped in to host in his stead.
If you don’t already know that, you may not be interested in the video I’m sharing of John Oliver’s appearance on Charlie Rose from Monday, Aug. 8th, just as John-with-an-h was starting his final week as Jon-without’s substitute.
Me, I love this kind of process talk. I’ve been reading behind-the-scenes stuff about
how comics, music, film, and television are crafted (theater and prose, to a lesser extent, too) since I was a kid. It’s not really the gossip, which in on-air conversations like this one is incidental to nonexistent, so much as it is the plain old nuts-and-bolts of how creative work — and in particular collaborative creative work — is made that fascinates.
As great as the political satire on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report is, sometimes the shows’ finest comedy is wrung out of human-interest stories on a very modest scale.
On Monday Colbert led off with an installment of its occasional series The Enemy Within about misplaced scallop gonads in Maine. It’s a great mix of making fun of these kinds of field pieces on the one hand and on the other simply letting the ridiculous nature of the incident speak for itself. You’re guaranteed to laugh or the next post on this blog is free. [Warning: Scallop gonads, in case you missed that, but they’re really just the MacGuffin. And... Update: The link is dead now that the show’s over.]
Related: Deft Wonk • Brittality • Not Necessarily Not the News
Last Thursday Conan O’Brien, now holding court weeknights on TBS’s Conan, stopped by CBS’s The Late Show with David Letterman to chat with Dave about something the hosts rather infamously have in common.
I refer of course to sons playing tee-ball.
They also found time to discuss each man, in his own way, having been screwed out
of the former marquee gig in late-night broadcasting — Johnny Carson’s (and Jack Paar’s and Steve Allen’s) old chair behind the Tonight Show desk — by NBC in favor of Jay Leno. It’s a metaphorical chair, to be sure; Tonight hasn’t been filmed in the studio Carson used, let alone with the same “home base” furniture and props, since Johnny left. And the TV landscape sure isn’t the same as it was when Conan took over the post-Tonight slot at NBC from Dave when Letterman went to CBS to challenge Leno, never mind how different it is from Carson’s heyday.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
If you’re looking for a laugh amidst pre-Oscar fatigue (or just because), I direct you to
a gallery of doctored movie posters over at The Shiznit.
Ali Gray has reworked posters for the annual glut of prestige films to give them titles and taglines bluntly reflective of what the viewing public and/or the promoters think about them.
I came across the image below after clicking on a bad link at Warner Bros.’ French site last month for my review of The Artist.
The studio probably has an “Error 404 / Page Not Found” message spelled out like the Hollywood sign in English on its domestic site, of course, and that would be a moment’s amusement at best; versions of the most mundane things in other languages than one’s own, however, even if they’re somewhat familiar, can seem... weird. N’est-ce pas?
And speaking of French, I’ve had a brief Slate interview with Tarran Killam on the origins of “Les Jeunes de Paris” sitting around for about a year.
David Letterman has been goofing about Twitter for a while now. He acts more befuddled than he really is — say, mistaking the 17 feeds that the official Late Show Twitter account is following for the number of followers it has, or literally typing in
the words “hash tag”.
I was merely bemused with this ongoing bit, however, with one exception, until the moment frozen in the above screencap struck me.
This post is currently down for maintenance.
