Stephen Colbert's legacy: Speaking truth to truthiness, regardless of cost

As Stephen Colbert leads the final four episodes of his Late Show this week, I examine his legacy as a performer and host with experts including Daily Show alums Hasan Minhaj and Roy Wood Jr.

As Stephen Colbert begins his final four days this week as host of CBS’ The Late Show, a natural question emerges:

What’s his ultimate legacy as a performer and host, after more than 3,000 shows over 20-plus years and two programs on two different networks?

To help answer that question for my piece today on NPR.org, I turned to some folks who I consider super smart students of the genre: former Daily Show correspondents Roy Wood Jr. and Hasan Minhaj, along with Bill Carter, the guy who literally wrote the book on late night TV – actually TWO books – while serving for many years as the New York Times’ top TV correspondent and analyst.

I pulled together their thoughts with my own for an NPR piece which actually charts Colbert’s evolution from his partnership with Steve Carrell on Saturday Night Live alum Dana Carvey’s ill-fated ABC comedy show through his time on the Daily Show, his spin-off The Colbert Report and his work succeeding David Letterman as host of The Late Show.

(Speaking of, it was pretty delightful to see Letterman return to the Ed Sullivan Theater for a visit to the Late Show last week, recalling one of his classic bits by dropping expensive furniture from the show onto a giant CBS logo. Fitting response to a network which walked away from a 30-year franchise without even trying to save it.)

I won’t reveal everything Wood, Minhaj and Carter told me here – please click through to the NPR piece to check it all out. But here’s a juicy quote from each to get the ball rolling.

Roy Wood Jr. (Daily Show, CNN’s Have I Got News For You) told me he thinks great late night shows are born from prodigious talent under extreme pressure – and there was no pressure greater than succeeding Letterman’s run. “Colbert was really in an impossible position; he was the man replacing the man…(But) he’s always struck me as someone who’s going to do exactly what he wants to do. And he’s earned the right to do that. The idea of speaking truth to power…there are less places for that. We’re running out of town squares and the ones that are left are regulated by algorithms.”

Hasan Minhaj said that, when he joined the Daily Show, correspondents would study Colbert’s field pieces like a combination of textbook and cheat code, learning the basics of the job by watching his work. “The brilliance of the Colbert Report (where he played the character of a self-involved, clueless right-wing pundit), my interpretation was that he said ‘Hey the heaviness of the news can be a lot and maybe people are seeing it in a direct way. What if I were to crank up the satire and my character to such an absurd level that its actually this very unique sneak attack on how to really analyze and process the news?’ In a world where truth can be too heavy, satire is the secret punch to allow us to engage in those topics in a new and interesting way.”

Bill Carter, who offered definitive coverage on how Letterman lost the Tonight Show job to Jay Leno, among many other scoops, says Colbert’s Late Show didn’t rest on comedy “bits” in the same way Carson and Letterman did. “I think he’s been a dynamic comic in terms of point of view comedy. In his final shows, he’s not doing a whole lot of clips from famous moments, because that’s not his show. He didn’t do bits, that was not his show. So he does have a different place in late night for sure.”

(Both Carter and Minhaj named, in separate interviews, the same idea for what Colbert’s should do after The Late Show ends. What did they say? CLICK HERE to find out!)

Not that Colbert didn’t try to do bits early on. One of them, where he offered a parody of the Hunger Games while attending the Republican National Convention in 2016, even signaled a turn-around for the show, when he began to talk more about politics and seemed to grow more comfortable facing the camera as himself.

I visited the show at the end of that year, my second visit to Colbert’s late show, though I never got to speak with the man himself. Instead, I spent time with Chris Licht – showrunner for Colbert’s Late Show before his ill-fated run as chairman and CEO of CNN – who noted that taking on many of the non-comedic aspects of the show’s production allowed his boss to focus on the funny.

According to CBS publicity, this is what Colbert has planned for this final week:

Monday, May 18 *NEW*

• The Worst of THE LATE SHOW with STEPHEN COLBERT (Not A Clip Show!)

Tuesday, May 19 *NEW*

• Jon Stewart

• Steven Spielberg

• Special performance by David Byrne and Stephen Colbert

Wednesday, May 20 *NEW*

• Stephen Colbert takes “The Colbert Questionert,” featuring special guests

• Performance by Bruce Springsteen

Thursday, May 21 *NEW*

• THE LATE SHOW with STEPHEN COLBERT Series Finale

There is a sense that CBS and Paramount have sold out late night TV cheap, leasing the two hours once occupied by The Late Show and After Midnight (and before that, The Late, Late Show) to media entrepreneur Byron Allen to air his toothless panel show for standups, Comics Unleashed.

Sure, as Allen is pointing out in a series of media interviews, Paramount/CBS will likely make money in the arrangement. And they will need it – if their purchase of Warner Bros Discovery goes through, some estimates predict it will generate $79 billion in debt, requiring lots of cost-cutting across the company.

But training a broadcast audience to expect less in a timeslot which offered original comedy programming from the network for 30-plus-years seems like mortgaging the future to get through the present. Short term, I expect to see ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel become the new King of Late Night TV, inheriting a good portion of Colbert’s current viewers who will resent the way their hero was benched by a company which seems to be shamelessly courting the favor of the Trump administration.

Still, that seems to be the position of many media moguls in this modern age, working the numbers to maximize profit while cheapening their products in hope that enough customers stay in the mix that they can hold their empires together.

In the process, everything they own declines in quality, leaving as their legacy a long string of broken careers, diminished platforms and great personal wealth (just ask Warners’ David Zaslav about how that plays out.)

Given that context, perhaps Colbert is getting out while the getting is good — leaving the late night stage with a consistent legacy of elevating smarts, funny, truth and honorable behavior, regardless of who it angered.

To end on a high note, CLICK HERE to check out The Late Show’s ridiculously talented bandleader Louis Cato and the Great Big Joy Machine performing “Metro Card” for the Grammy museum.