All my hopes for Stephen Colbert changing both late night and all of television faltered a bit after Tuesday’s patchy start of “The Late Show,” with its pointless George Clooney exchange and super-chopped-up Jeb Bush interviews. That show, the remnant of a bloated two hour taping, almost never got on the air because of all of the last minute editing, Colbert admitted Wednesday in a show that was only a tiny bit better.
It featured an interview with Scarlett Johansson in which the host was more interested in injecting his own charm than hearing his guest and had another one of those aggressively weird segments involving a Genghis Khan hat, spouting oddball decrees (in a bit that echoed both Conan O’Brien’s “In the Year 2000” and, visually anyway, Johnny Carson’s Carnac the Magnificent).
The first night, he did a haunted amulet thing that seemed more intent on declaring his intention on being weirder than existing late night hosts (while bringing on a product placement thing for hummus that seemed too early for both the show and the episode).
There have been a lot more echoes of his supposedly dead character on “The Colbert Report” than expected, from the cultish “Stephen! Stephen!” calls that seem out of place to the multiple images of his face on the (projected) his discomfort in doing a standup monologue. He just does a minute or so before the main opening credits run and then he’s at the desk he’s so comfortable in. There, he uses the newscasters’ visual windows behind him punctuating his still-sharp political humor.
There has been so much Trump material this summer, it was time to gorge on it like Oreos, which he did. But even politically, he hasn’t been on top of his game as yet.
That all changed Thursday, when his remarkable interview with Vice President Joe Biden demonstrated how great the new “Late Show” could be. Doffing all aspects of his goofy persona, he was about as good an interviewer of Biden as I’ve ever seen — empathetic, wise, and best of all, sitting back and listening to his answers, much of them about the death of his son Beau, without butting in or going to the joke.
Though it basically had no policy content, the lengthy segments really ranked up there with the best political interviews ever conducted on late night. It showed the possibilities for late night returning to its roots of intelligent, absorbing conversation. If Biden gets into the race, the interview will have proved to have been a turning point.
Colbert allowed his humor to enliven his following conversation with Uber creator Travis Kalanick, which, like the interview with Elon Musk the day before, showed the ability of Colbert to converse and get answers out of pretty interesting modern inventors.
If he keeps up this kind of assured tone and smart curiosity, “The Late Show” will have transcended the jitters of the first couple of shows and proven its potential to raise the level of late night beyond karaoke and parlor games.