When news stories fall through the cracks, we here at Colbert News Hub find them for a post we call, In The Press.
Hi Hubsters! Can you believe two months have already passed since the premiere? Things seem to be settling down at The Late Show With Starring Stephen Colbert. The shows are becoming much more consistent and I already see some favorite regular segments emerge (personal favorites: Bedtime Stories and The Hungry For Power Games).
But let’s get right to it, because there are a lot of articles this month! The media has been paying a lot of attention to The Late Show’s unique blend of guests, so you’ll find a bunch of articles about that. You’ll find quotes by Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel weighing in on how Stephen has been doing so far. There’s a lot of talk of ad revenue and ratings of course. There are people getting angry at Stephen including the usual suspect, Fox News. There’s also a great article by someone who knew Stephen at The Second City, and a fun article about “achievement beards.”
Stephen Colbert
One of my favorite Christmas songs is “Have I Got A Present for You,” which you did on Stephen Colbert’s Christmas special, which showed a great sense of humor. How did that song come about?
When I first met him, he was playing his character; a right-wing pundit, but he was basically making fun of the right wing. He didn’t know me and his staff didn’t know me, all they knew about me was the headlines. But he told me after we became friends, “You know, the first time we had you on the show, I brought you in here to hammer you. We started in on you, and you were so much fun, and not the guy that everybody in the media painted you as.”
Later, I did his big finale [the last episode of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central], and he wanted me on the show in the first week. At the songwriters Hall of Fame, everyone had someone sing one of their songs, and I picked him. He came out and sang “Good as I Once Was.” It’s a weird relationship, it’s kind of like I had to earn his respect, because he had a different picture of what I was going to be.
- Les Moonves’ Evaluation of Stephen Colbert – The Wall Street Journal
Six weeks in, Les Moonves (a.k.a. CEO of CBS, a.k.a. Stephen’s boss), told The Wall Street Journal at the WSJDLive 2015 conference that he was delighted with Stephen’s performance both in terms of content and ratings. Evidently the focus is still on getting Donnys to watch the show.
I’m extraordinarily pleased. He’s only been on for six weeks. Needless to say, his numbers are far better than David’s were and they’re far younger. He’s brought the 18-to-34-year-old male with him. And at CBS, as you know, we’re a little bit older skewing than some of our competitors. So getting those 18-to-34-year-old males has been very, very lucrative. I think he’s also made news. He’s made a lot of news; he’s had some terrific interviews; he’s come off the entertainment page. His interview with Joe Biden was great, with Donald Trump [as well]. I think he wisely put Jeb Bush on the first show and I think the Republicans say, “Okay, this guy is friendly to me as well, he’s not just one-sided in terms of that.” I think he’s added extraordinary energy to the space. I couldn’t be happier qualitatively and quantitatively with what’s happening with Colbert.
- Tesla’s Best Celebrity Evangelist Emerges: It’s Stephen Colbert – Bloomberg
Ever since he first interviewed Elon Musk on The Colbert Report, Stephen hasn’t been shy about his love for Tesla: “I saw X-Men on Saturday night and then I walked back to my Tesla — ‘cause I have a Tesla — and it just greeted me. The door handles came out, and it just felt like it was my friend.” Stephen also dedicated a segment to Tesla last month.
“The Colbert segment was amazing because it was so long, it was Colbert, it was Colbert’s new show and instead of being playfully sarcastic he was overwhelmingly positive,” said Lincoln Merrihew, senior vice president of client services for Millward Brown Digital in Boston, who first watched the Colbert clip on YouTube. “The magic of a celebrity evangelist is that they love a product so much that they will talk about it for free. It was more than a simple endorsement; it was more like a commercial.”
- What I Learned From Stephen Colbert – Improv Nerd Blog
This is my favorite kind of article. It gives us some insight into what it was like to know and work with Stephen when he was younger. Jimmy Carrane worked at The Second City in Chicago. He talks about how he and his friends were “skeptical, judgmental and jealous” when Stephen got hired for the touring company, but eventually came to respect and even learn from him.
It also freed him up to be generous as a performer, since, unlike me, he was not worried about himself and how he was performing on camera. When I flubbed some of my lines, he was very patient and helped me get back on track. He never missed an opportunity to make me look good. Maybe this was no big deal for him. Maybe he’d done a hundred of shitty corporate videos before and he could do these in his sleep, and he was not a nervous wreck inside like me. I think one of the coolest compliments an actor can get, and one that I have not achieved or deserved, is “that guy is very generous actor.” That was Colbert. It all made sense to me when he told me later that day that when he couldn’t come up with any ideas for sketches at Second City, he would go over to other cast members’ apartments and help them work on their ideas to help him get unstuck.
- Jimmy Kimmel on His Brooklyn Shows, Jay Leno’s Burn, and Beards – Vulture
Jimmy 1 (that’s my theory and I stand by it) was interviewed ahead of his Brooklyn shows. He talked about Stephen’s new show, about the new “late-night landscape” and about the lack of female hosts (“It’s not like the opportunities aren’t there, the people to whom they’re being presented don’t want them.”)
I watched you on Colbert last week, and the two of you seemed to have a great rapport. It’s the Colbert Report.
He’s doing great. It’s hard to get a show going. People are so focused on the host and his performance, but your whole staff is learning a new thing, and that’s hard, especially when you’re starting from scratch bit-wise, and you can’t really bring your material from the other show to this show. But he’s doing a very good job.
Did you give him any advice? He didn’t ask. [Laughs.] I don’t think he needs advice from me.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Part of what’s confounding about it is that Colbert seems to be protecting himself from being himself in some way — at least from being too open and, if not vulnerable, then softer or more welcoming than he’s used to. And that makes perfect sense. He’s a comedian and actor who has played mostly with irony and satire, which has kept him at a distance from being himself. Except for more intimate interviews, this is one of the rare times that Colbert’s job — what he’s been hired to do — is to actually be Stephen Colbert.
The strangest thing right now is to realize Colbert is the least open book in late night. You know who Jimmy Kimmel really is. And you know who Jimmy Fallon is. (At least to the extent that we know any of these people.) But from their history, from what they’ve revealed about themselves, viewers get the sense that if they were somehow to be hanging out on a weekend with either Jimmy, they’d probably act pretty much the way they do on TV.
That doesn’t yet seem true for Colbert.
“He has better political guests than celebrity guests,” said one admirer, a former producer on one of Washington’s Sunday morning shows. “He genuinely knows what he’s talking about.”
[…] Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign was “eyes wide-open” about Colbert’s “liberal bent,” said spokesman Tim Miller, “but the opportunity to do his first show and show Jeb in a non-political environment overwhelmed the risks in our mind.”
The campaign ended up being happy with the appearance, and much of the segment was repeatedly shown on cable television, giving the former Florida governor valuable media time.
Observers say they’d be wary of advising other candidates to go on Colbert’s show, given his reputation and ability for verbal combat.
“I’d be far more scared of him if I was a politician,” the former Sunday show producer said.
But appearing on the program is an enticing opportunity, particularly for guests who can score points by going head-to-head with television’s new political power.
- Understanding Bob Brady – The Philadelphia Citizen
You might remember Bob Brady as the guy who stole the Pope’s used glass of water. Apparently the congressman didn’t exactly appreciate being made fun of on The Late Show…
They’re not from Philly is how Bob Brady sees the world: It’s us against them. And if you don’t get Bob Brady, you don’t get Philly. “I could care less about Stephen Colbert—fuck Stephen Colbert,” he told me when I called him this week, because I couldn’t stop thinking about the meaning of Bob Brady.
Colbert’s arrival has also led to growth in another important metric for CBS: the number of people watching its videos online. In September, CBS Interactive drew 34.6 million US desktop unique video viewers, according to comScore. That represented more than 40% year-over-year growth, and the network’s highest video audience in comScore’s records, which start in 2012. … Colbert had 4.6 million desktop viewers in September, significantly higher than Letterman’s old numbers, according to comScore. (To be sure, this isn’t a perfect or complete measurement, as it only reflects desktop viewing. Social-led video viewing is now largely conducted on mobile, which is harder to track.) [The Late Show videoclip. STEPHEN COLBERT: There are a lot of people out there talking about the use of excessive force by the police. And without courting any controversy I wanna say that the police have a very hard job, putting their lives on the line, and the vast majority are good people. On the other hand, black people aren’t imagining this stuff. So let me just take a moment here to say that I agree with how you feel. You know who you are. I feel strongly about that. And those people on the other side? Wrong.]
ERIC BOLLING: I think Stephen Colbert used to be funny, I’m not sure what happened to him. His numbers are wrong. The numbers don’t bear that out. The numbers bear out that at the rate at which African-Americans commit crime, it’s commensurate with the amount of times that they end up dead at the hand of a cop. If you take the same rate and apply it to the white people, there are far more white people who are killed at the other end of a cop’s gun, but they commit — 83 percent of the country is white, 13 or 14 percent is black. I mean, the numbers are consistent, cops aren’t killing African-Americans at a higher rate than African-Americans are committing crime.
[I]t is Colbert who is the bridge between nerd culture and “what’s cool”. He became one of television’s biggest personalities on The Colbert Report, all while challenging James Franco to JRR Tolkien trivia contests and starring in a comic book series, and his profile has only expanded since taking over for David Letterman at CBS.
Most importantly, despite being the oldest host in late night television at 51, Colbert relates to his young, video game-playing audience – one of the youngest in late night – because he is a self-proclaimed nerd who understands that his interests didn’t always demand widespread attention like they do now, and that his nerd peers, the early adopters of the new normal, deserve their time in the spotlight.
“I was a nerd when nerd was nerd,” he told Time in August. “OK? All right? There was no reward. No one catered to us. We weren’t a demographic. We were a punching bag and a punch line. There was a movie called Revenge of the Nerds because the nerds needed revenge because of all of the things that were happening to them. That’s a cultural artifact that people need to understand.”
Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel sputtered over Colbert’s question of how assured users should be that their messages are truly gone. Uber’s Kalanick faced a similar grilling on the working conditions of Uber drivers, as well as his desire to replace those same drivers with automated cars. And just this week, AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky faced questions from Colbert over the questionable safety record of the app, whether “disruption” is really a good thing, and to what extent AirBnB is a beneficiary of the Great Recession.
But of course, this is still late night TV. None of these men faced the full scrutiny to which actual journalists might have subjected them, and the visits were clearly all in good fun.
… But by merely introducing the concept of the sharing economy to older audiences, Colbert is forcing into the light conversations typically reserved for Marc Andreessen’s tweetstorms and the comments sections of Re/Code. These are public debates that need to happen across all age spectrums, not just the older viewers of late night television.
Colbert has had 47 regular guests on the show. (Performers don’t count unless the artist also took part in the interview portion of the program.) Among those 47 guests, 15 were politicians, 25 were entertainers and six were tech figures. Colbert also had one sports star on the show: Golden State Warrior Stephen Curry. Only 32% of the pool were women. Advertisers have bought in. “Demand never wavered, and when we sold the upfront we didn’t change our pricing at all,” says Jeff Lucas, head of sales and marketing at Viacom. “We said, ‘Jon’s show is getting older, and we want to be younger. Trevor Noah is the only millennial host, and we think we can cut through the clutter.’”
Message received: Daily Show sponsorships are sold through January, and the program will soon feature brand integrations for the first time (“We have a lot of plans,” said Lucas). The Daily Show‘s average 30-second ad rate is $36,890, according to SQAD NetCosts, the second highest in late night.
Jon Stewart has set a four-year production pact with HBO that calls for him to produce short-form video content for HBO’s digital platforms. The deal also includes a first-look option for film and TV projects. … The first project under the HBO pact involves Stewart working with cloud graphics company OTOY Inc. on what is described as a new technology to allow him to produce “timely” short-form video content to be featured on HBO Now, the newly launched stand-alone broadband service, multiple times a day. Generally, though, the achievement beard is notable not because it projects its wearer’s public image but because it doesn’t. The achievement-bearded Letterman is unlike the Letterman we know.
So which Letterman is the “real” Letterman, bearded or unbearded? Would the bearded man even exist were it not for the ascent of his clean-shaven counterpart? Such ontological questions confound the mind, but it is possible to solve them using diagrams.
In the Press – October 2015
Hi Hubsters! Can you believe two months have already passed since the premiere? Things seem to be settling down at The Late Show With Starring Stephen Colbert. The shows are becoming much more consistent and I already see some favorite regular segments emerge (personal favorites: Bedtime Stories and The Hungry For Power Games).
But let’s get right to it, because there are a lot of articles this month! The media has been paying a lot of attention to The Late Show’s unique blend of guests, so you’ll find a bunch of articles about that. You’ll find quotes by Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel weighing in on how Stephen has been doing so far. There’s a lot of talk of ad revenue and ratings of course. There are people getting angry at Stephen including the usual suspect, Fox News. There’s also a great article by someone who knew Stephen at The Second City, and a fun article about “achievement beards.”
Stephen Colbert
One of my favorite Christmas songs is “Have I Got A Present for You,” which you did on Stephen Colbert’s Christmas special, which showed a great sense of humor. How did that song come about?
When I first met him, he was playing his character; a right-wing pundit, but he was basically making fun of the right wing. He didn’t know me and his staff didn’t know me, all they knew about me was the headlines. But he told me after we became friends, “You know, the first time we had you on the show, I brought you in here to hammer you. We started in on you, and you were so much fun, and not the guy that everybody in the media painted you as.”
Later, I did his big finale [the last episode of The Colbert Report on Comedy Central], and he wanted me on the show in the first week. At the songwriters Hall of Fame, everyone had someone sing one of their songs, and I picked him. He came out and sang “Good as I Once Was.” It’s a weird relationship, it’s kind of like I had to earn his respect, because he had a different picture of what I was going to be.
Six weeks in, Les Moonves (a.k.a. CEO of CBS, a.k.a. Stephen’s boss), told The Wall Street Journal at the WSJDLive 2015 conference that he was delighted with Stephen’s performance both in terms of content and ratings. Evidently the focus is still on getting Donnys to watch the show.
I’m extraordinarily pleased. He’s only been on for six weeks. Needless to say, his numbers are far better than David’s were and they’re far younger. He’s brought the 18-to-34-year-old male with him. And at CBS, as you know, we’re a little bit older skewing than some of our competitors. So getting those 18-to-34-year-old males has been very, very lucrative. I think he’s also made news. He’s made a lot of news; he’s had some terrific interviews; he’s come off the entertainment page. His interview with Joe Biden was great, with Donald Trump [as well]. I think he wisely put Jeb Bush on the first show and I think the Republicans say, “Okay, this guy is friendly to me as well, he’s not just one-sided in terms of that.” I think he’s added extraordinary energy to the space. I couldn’t be happier qualitatively and quantitatively with what’s happening with Colbert.
Ever since he first interviewed Elon Musk on The Colbert Report, Stephen hasn’t been shy about his love for Tesla: “I saw X-Men on Saturday night and then I walked back to my Tesla — ‘cause I have a Tesla — and it just greeted me. The door handles came out, and it just felt like it was my friend.” Stephen also dedicated a segment to Tesla last month.
“The Colbert segment was amazing because it was so long, it was Colbert, it was Colbert’s new show and instead of being playfully sarcastic he was overwhelmingly positive,” said Lincoln Merrihew, senior vice president of client services for Millward Brown Digital in Boston, who first watched the Colbert clip on YouTube. “The magic of a celebrity evangelist is that they love a product so much that they will talk about it for free. It was more than a simple endorsement; it was more like a commercial.”
This is my favorite kind of article. It gives us some insight into what it was like to know and work with Stephen when he was younger. Jimmy Carrane worked at The Second City in Chicago. He talks about how he and his friends were “skeptical, judgmental and jealous” when Stephen got hired for the touring company, but eventually came to respect and even learn from him.
It also freed him up to be generous as a performer, since, unlike me, he was not worried about himself and how he was performing on camera. When I flubbed some of my lines, he was very patient and helped me get back on track. He never missed an opportunity to make me look good. Maybe this was no big deal for him. Maybe he’d done a hundred of shitty corporate videos before and he could do these in his sleep, and he was not a nervous wreck inside like me. I think one of the coolest compliments an actor can get, and one that I have not achieved or deserved, is “that guy is very generous actor.” That was Colbert. It all made sense to me when he told me later that day that when he couldn’t come up with any ideas for sketches at Second City, he would go over to other cast members’ apartments and help them work on their ideas to help him get unstuck.
Jimmy 1 (that’s my theory and I stand by it) was interviewed ahead of his Brooklyn shows. He talked about Stephen’s new show, about the new “late-night landscape” and about the lack of female hosts (“It’s not like the opportunities aren’t there, the people to whom they’re being presented don’t want them.”)
I watched you on Colbert last week, and the two of you seemed to have a great rapport. It’s the Colbert Report.
He’s doing great. It’s hard to get a show going. People are so focused on the host and his performance, but your whole staff is learning a new thing, and that’s hard, especially when you’re starting from scratch bit-wise, and you can’t really bring your material from the other show to this show. But he’s doing a very good job.
Did you give him any advice? He didn’t ask. [Laughs.] I don’t think he needs advice from me.
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
I think it’s pretty safe to say that Stephen is still confusing everyone. Is that “the real Stephen Colbert” we’re seeing on The Late Show? Are we seeing hints of the character during segments? During interviews? Tim Goodman, who wrote this next article, says the show improved very quickly but that he still doesn’t feel like he’s watching “the real Stephen Colbert.” What I wonder is, why would Stephen even have to act “pretty much the way” he would “hanging out on a weekend” when he’s on TV? I think the show is made more interesting by Stephen’s ability to use various aspects of his personality and to go in and out of “character,” whatever character that may be (including “talk show host”). Perhaps it’s once again just a matter of figuring out when to dial it down.
The article was written about four weeks into the show though, and the writer might feel differently now — or not. What do you guys think?
Part of what’s confounding about it is that Colbert seems to be protecting himself from being himself in some way — at least from being too open and, if not vulnerable, then softer or more welcoming than he’s used to. And that makes perfect sense. He’s a comedian and actor who has played mostly with irony and satire, which has kept him at a distance from being himself. Except for more intimate interviews, this is one of the rare times that Colbert’s job — what he’s been hired to do — is to actually be Stephen Colbert.
The strangest thing right now is to realize Colbert is the least open book in late night. You know who Jimmy Kimmel really is. And you know who Jimmy Fallon is. (At least to the extent that we know any of these people.) But from their history, from what they’ve revealed about themselves, viewers get the sense that if they were somehow to be hanging out on a weekend with either Jimmy, they’d probably act pretty much the way they do on TV.
That doesn’t yet seem true for Colbert.
“He has better political guests than celebrity guests,” said one admirer, a former producer on one of Washington’s Sunday morning shows. “He genuinely knows what he’s talking about.”
[…] Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign was “eyes wide-open” about Colbert’s “liberal bent,” said spokesman Tim Miller, “but the opportunity to do his first show and show Jeb in a non-political environment overwhelmed the risks in our mind.”
The campaign ended up being happy with the appearance, and much of the segment was repeatedly shown on cable television, giving the former Florida governor valuable media time.
Observers say they’d be wary of advising other candidates to go on Colbert’s show, given his reputation and ability for verbal combat.
“I’d be far more scared of him if I was a politician,” the former Sunday show producer said.
But appearing on the program is an enticing opportunity, particularly for guests who can score points by going head-to-head with television’s new political power.
You might remember Bob Brady as the guy who stole the Pope’s used glass of water. Apparently the congressman didn’t exactly appreciate being made fun of on The Late Show…
They’re not from Philly is how Bob Brady sees the world: It’s us against them. And if you don’t get Bob Brady, you don’t get Philly. “I could care less about Stephen Colbert—fuck Stephen Colbert,” he told me when I called him this week, because I couldn’t stop thinking about the meaning of Bob Brady.
Colbert’s arrival has also led to growth in another important metric for CBS: the number of people watching its videos online. In September, CBS Interactive drew 34.6 million US desktop unique video viewers, according to comScore. That represented more than 40% year-over-year growth, and the network’s highest video audience in comScore’s records, which start in 2012. … Colbert had 4.6 million desktop viewers in September, significantly higher than Letterman’s old numbers, according to comScore. (To be sure, this isn’t a perfect or complete measurement, as it only reflects desktop viewing. Social-led video viewing is now largely conducted on mobile, which is harder to track.) [The Late Show videoclip. STEPHEN COLBERT: There are a lot of people out there talking about the use of excessive force by the police. And without courting any controversy I wanna say that the police have a very hard job, putting their lives on the line, and the vast majority are good people. On the other hand, black people aren’t imagining this stuff. So let me just take a moment here to say that I agree with how you feel. You know who you are. I feel strongly about that. And those people on the other side? Wrong.]
ERIC BOLLING: I think Stephen Colbert used to be funny, I’m not sure what happened to him. His numbers are wrong. The numbers don’t bear that out. The numbers bear out that at the rate at which African-Americans commit crime, it’s commensurate with the amount of times that they end up dead at the hand of a cop. If you take the same rate and apply it to the white people, there are far more white people who are killed at the other end of a cop’s gun, but they commit — 83 percent of the country is white, 13 or 14 percent is black. I mean, the numbers are consistent, cops aren’t killing African-Americans at a higher rate than African-Americans are committing crime.
[I]t is Colbert who is the bridge between nerd culture and “what’s cool”. He became one of television’s biggest personalities on The Colbert Report, all while challenging James Franco to JRR Tolkien trivia contests and starring in a comic book series, and his profile has only expanded since taking over for David Letterman at CBS.
Most importantly, despite being the oldest host in late night television at 51, Colbert relates to his young, video game-playing audience – one of the youngest in late night – because he is a self-proclaimed nerd who understands that his interests didn’t always demand widespread attention like they do now, and that his nerd peers, the early adopters of the new normal, deserve their time in the spotlight.
“I was a nerd when nerd was nerd,” he told Time in August. “OK? All right? There was no reward. No one catered to us. We weren’t a demographic. We were a punching bag and a punch line. There was a movie called Revenge of the Nerds because the nerds needed revenge because of all of the things that were happening to them. That’s a cultural artifact that people need to understand.”
Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel sputtered over Colbert’s question of how assured users should be that their messages are truly gone. Uber’s Kalanick faced a similar grilling on the working conditions of Uber drivers, as well as his desire to replace those same drivers with automated cars. And just this week, AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky faced questions from Colbert over the questionable safety record of the app, whether “disruption” is really a good thing, and to what extent AirBnB is a beneficiary of the Great Recession.
But of course, this is still late night TV. None of these men faced the full scrutiny to which actual journalists might have subjected them, and the visits were clearly all in good fun.
… But by merely introducing the concept of the sharing economy to older audiences, Colbert is forcing into the light conversations typically reserved for Marc Andreessen’s tweetstorms and the comments sections of Re/Code. These are public debates that need to happen across all age spectrums, not just the older viewers of late night television.
Colbert has had 47 regular guests on the show. (Performers don’t count unless the artist also took part in the interview portion of the program.) Among those 47 guests, 15 were politicians, 25 were entertainers and six were tech figures. Colbert also had one sports star on the show: Golden State Warrior Stephen Curry. Only 32% of the pool were women. Advertisers have bought in. “Demand never wavered, and when we sold the upfront we didn’t change our pricing at all,” says Jeff Lucas, head of sales and marketing at Viacom. “We said, ‘Jon’s show is getting older, and we want to be younger. Trevor Noah is the only millennial host, and we think we can cut through the clutter.’”
Message received: Daily Show sponsorships are sold through January, and the program will soon feature brand integrations for the first time (“We have a lot of plans,” said Lucas). The Daily Show‘s average 30-second ad rate is $36,890, according to SQAD NetCosts, the second highest in late night.
Jon Stewart has set a four-year production pact with HBO that calls for him to produce short-form video content for HBO’s digital platforms. The deal also includes a first-look option for film and TV projects. … The first project under the HBO pact involves Stewart working with cloud graphics company OTOY Inc. on what is described as a new technology to allow him to produce “timely” short-form video content to be featured on HBO Now, the newly launched stand-alone broadband service, multiple times a day. Generally, though, the achievement beard is notable not because it projects its wearer’s public image but because it doesn’t. The achievement-bearded Letterman is unlike the Letterman we know.
So which Letterman is the “real” Letterman, bearded or unbearded? Would the bearded man even exist were it not for the ascent of his clean-shaven counterpart? Such ontological questions confound the mind, but it is possible to solve them using diagrams.