What's Wrong With Stephen Colbert's Late Night Show, According To...

Say what you will about Handler, and the article goes on to totally overstate her point -- she in no way called him "the root of the problem -- but she is spot on. Without thinking very hard I can come up with 7 late night hosts right now. Sure, each has a few sketches or whatever that kind of distinguish them from others, but they are 90% the exact same show.


The reason she points out Colbert, or why it's a relevant talking point, is he's not only the most recent addition, but he just had a 10 year run as one of the most innovative late night hosts of all time. He gets this platform and....bam..most generic late night show you can imagine.

As many have said, I don't know if Colbert is really having issues. I think late night is just becoming an outdated format, and if you can't create viral stuff like Fallon does, your doomed to just blend in with the rest of the crowd.

It'd be nice to see the field reduced to just 2-3 guys again, that might help.

Comedians wield a lot of power and can use this power to inflict a great deal of pain. 99.9% of the time, though, they get their kicks by revealing the hypocrisy, by putting jerks in their place, not in causing pain. Chelsea Handler gets off on hurting other people. Howard Stern used to love being hated, but it was mostly just a way of promoting himself, and not really his true character. I very rarely call anyone 'evil,' because I can almost always perceive the inner psychology. I don't justify their actions, but I can usually understand why they might be lashing out. Not Chelsea, though. Handler is just evil, plain and simple.

She's also part of a growing list of clueless celebrities who seem to want to come to the erroneous conclusion that Stephen is somehow not being himself- which I think most people here know is garbage. Love him or hate him, Stephen isn't trying to be anyone else.

All this being said, though, Stephen's failings do make him an easy target, so it's inevitable that competitors are going to be quick to point out his shortcomings, especially competitors without vocal filters. Handler may be a vile human being, but she isn't wrong when she points out the lack of originality on late night and Stephen's prominent role within that faulty paradigm.

http://splitsider.com/2016/05/the-late-show-with-stephen-colbert-is-still-searching-for-an-identity/

Last week, fans of Stephen Colbert and late night TV as a whole were hit with a minor shocker — Colbert and his Late Show staff are already working on re-tooling the show. Considering he’s only been the host for eight months, this is a bit unexpected, and can’t help but come across as a bit of a panic move. Still, for those of us who’ve been watching the show, this isn’t that much of a surprise. Colbert and his writers seem to have realized something that has been clear from the beginning: this show has no idea what it wants to be.

The problem with The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is not that it’s a bad show. Really, it has a lot of things going for it: Colbert is as likable and charming as ever, and segments like Big Furry Hat, Wheel Of News, and most of all The Hungry For Power Games are consistently enjoyable. So, what’s the problem? Well, while the show succeeds at being entertaining, it doesn’t have all that much of a purpose. It seems to exist for the sake of existing. It’s as though we could all agree that Stephen Colbert deserves to be on television, and having him take over Letterman’s time slot seemed like a pretty cool idea, so here he is at 11:35 five nights a week, except Colbert and his writers are still struggling with the question of what he’s supposed to do.

Comparing this show to the Colbert Report almost seems unfair — for nine years, that was one of the most in-depth, spot-on pieces of political satire around. Colbert’s subsequent program had a ton of pressure to live up to, and pillorying it because it can’t quite reach that level feels like the byproduct of unrealistic expectations. At the same time, when looking at the two programs, it’s not hard to notice that a lot of what made the Report so great seems to be absent from The Late Show.

For one thing, there’s lack of weight behind what Colbert has to say. While Colbert’s right-wing persona was finely-tuned to the last detail, the alleged real Colbert seems a bit shy about telling us what he actually thinks. He makes jokes about every candidate, but there’s not a clear direction for it to go in. This is perfectly fine if all you’re asking for out of a late night host is some clever one-liners about Those Clowns In Congress, but without any conviction behind his humor, it’s harder and harder to differentiate him from strictly apolitical hosts like Jimmy Fallon or James Corden.

Perhaps the starkest contrast between the two shows lies in the interview segments. In the first two weeks of The Late Show, Colbert interviewed three Republican presidential candidates: Jeb Bush, Ted Cruz, and Donald Trump (the Bush interview came in his first episode). There was massive buzz going into all three of them — how would Colbert, now free of his conservative persona, and able to tell us what he really thinks, tear into these people? The answer, unfortunately, was “not all that much.” In the Jeb interview, he seemed content to play on the notion that he was a Respectable Conservative, and avoided saying anything substantial about his actual views on the issues. All that seemed to matter was that he wasn’t an utter lunatic like Trump. This was disappointing enough, but then, he failed to really go in on Trump. Perhaps it was because he assumed Trump’s ridiculousness would speak for itself. Still, when Fallon’s Trump interview — which at least gave us Trump’s immortal line about not having anything to apologize for — is more biting than your own, that’s a bit of a problem.

The only one of those interviews that gave us any real meat was the Cruz one. When Cruz described his platform with a bunch of agreeable, non-descript platitudes that didn’t say much about what he actually planned on doing, Colbert finished his thought with “…and no gay marriage.” When a stammering Cruz attempted to fall back on his pre-planned lines, the crowd began to boo, only relenting after Colbert politely asked them to stop. At the time, this felt like a preview of what The Late Show would be on a regular basis. Instead, it feels like an outlier, as the show continues to be a reasonably fun way to kill an hour, but not exactly a key source of biting political commentary. When we think of Colbert’s best interviews on the Report, like the time he laid conservative author Laura Ingraham to waste for her racist diatribe The Obama Diaries, one can’t help but see this show as a bit lacking.

One of the most-talked about aspects of Colbert’s CBS gig was the idea that by dropping the conservative persona that had defined him for nine years, we’d get to see the true Colbert. Instead, the opposite has been the case; without the safety of his character, Colbert has pulled punches on both sides, and hasn’t really given us any real insights into what he actually believes. When we consider that Colbert is a devout Catholic, that he once said there was a “nonzero chance” he’d vote Jeb Bush in a presidential election, and that he once stated the he occasionally agreed with his Report character, part of this might be because he’s actually more conservative than we might think, and that he recognizes that by speaking on his more conservative-friendly stances, he could alienate the left-leaning millennial audience that has embraced him since his time on The Daily Show. But speaking as part of that liberal millennial audience, it would be more interesting to watch Colbert present me with an opinion that I disagree with than continue to hedge his bets every night.

In spite of The Late Show‘s flaws, it is obviously salvageable. The show still has an immensely charming host, and a few segments that are definite keepers. It just needs to to decide what it wants to be, and what it wants to say. There’s quite a bit of hope that the show can improve and become something great. For quite some time, Late Night with Seth Meyers was even more directionless than this show, but with his A Closer Look segments — in which he is not afraid to tell us what he actually thinks — Seth has established himself as a key part of the late-night world. By adding more bite to his political humor, and by figuring out exactly what he wants his Late Show to be, Colbert can recover from some disappointing early returns and remind why we love him so much.

http://www.radiodiscussions.com/showthread.php?694955-Future-of-Colbert-s-Late-Show&p=6102507&viewfull=1#post6102507

The main problems with Colbert is that there is a bunch of things going on at the same time.

1. His type of comedy is too political and worked better with the "Colbert" character then the real Stephen Colbert and he is missing something but it might be the Character or "Cobert Report" exclusive bits that might be intellectual property of Comedy Central/Viacom.

2. It's rated TV-PG, which is not edgy enough for a late night show, while the rest of the shows are TV-14.

3. Over-saturation of the late night TV, one too many late nights shows on at the same time, Colbert is up against The Tonight Show on NBC, Jimmy Kimmel Live on ABC, The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore on Comedy Central, and the second half of Conan O'Brien on TBS as well as other competition from west coast Sports events, reruns and syndication shows like Dish Nation and TMZ, ESPN SportsCenter, and of course, Adult Swim reruns of Family Guy.

4. The cord cutters who watch anything on-demand via internet, and it's possible Colbert is getting more views online then on the CBS at the 11:35 PM ET airing.

5. There are other political based late nights shows, some with Former Jon Stewart era Daily Show regulars hosting then. Last Week Tonight seems to be the best in this concept of late night show right now, cause John Oliver was truly the heir the Daily Show throne, but he left before Jon Stewart's retirement from the Daily Show and Trevor Noah became Stewart successor instead. Trevor has done OK, but he's no Jon Stewart or John Oliver.