The Late Show with Stephen Colbert ends its run on Thursday night. Our critic-at-large, Eric Deggans, will be posting his takes on the last episodes right here.
Most TV shows wrapping up after more than 10 years in the game would start off their finale week with an avalanche of clips capturing the most impactful moments from the program's long run.
But The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is no ordinary program.
So Colbert kicked off the show's last four episodes Monday, with a "best of the worst of" episode, featuring a bunch of comedy bits so awful they mostly never aired at all. Which was really a sideways strategy for paying tribute to the show's staff – who packed into the seats at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York for this cavalcade of awful, shouting out comments on stuff like video clips featuring a fake ad for "erotic body gravy" that Colbert originally declined to air because the good-looking actors featured in it just looked like "soft core gravy porn."
Words cannot describe how right Colbert was then.
There was more: A Graphics Graveyard bit featuring a never-aired image proclaiming Hillary Clinton the 45th president (they had hoped to use it during live election coverage in 2016 – sad trombone sound here). A middling field piece featuring Colbert and a staffer buddy surprising a perplexed woman living in the apartment where they once stayed in Chicago. And longtime staffer Brian Stack playing Shrieking Joe, a Kid Rock parody so abrasive that ratings took a nosedive whenever he was on – a trend I don't expect to end with Monday's episode.
It all unfolded in a way that left this critic feeling like he crashed the show's last office party – watching lots of mildly funny material that probably hits a lot harder when you know the office drama behind making it.
As the show counts down its final nights, Colbert has tried hard to deflect anger, sadness or lionizing of his work. So I can see how an episode like this might have felt like a saucy way to redirect the inevitable nostalgia. But Monday's episode didn't give fans much to celebrate, beyond the obvious camaraderie the staff enjoys, even now.
In the end, as David Letterman's former bandleader Paul Shaffer joined Colbert, the band, a bunch of dancers and one of his writers to sing a fish-themed parody of Shaffer's 1982 disco pop classic "It's Raining Men" – by the way, it's not hard at all to believe that Colbert's writers rejected this bit four times since 2011 – it all felt like a bit of a missed opportunity.
Here's hoping the next three episodes give fans what they really want – a chance to celebrate the final hours of one of late night's best satirists.
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