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I’ve been tickled by what both Seth Meyers and Trevor Noah have done with their quarantine-era programs, but the biggest surprise to me has been just how entertaining Stephen Colbert has been on CBS’s Late Show. (I miss, daily, Craig Ferguson, whose CBS show ended in 2014, because he was the best conversationalist on television.) But the Covid-19 pandemic has forced at least some of that spirit back into late-night programs, and it’s been fascinating to see who’s been most revitalized by it. That sort of loose and goofy energy is too rare in modern late-night, where everything is tightly scripted and every interview is a promotional opportunity. The squabble eventually devolved into a barely choreographed slapstick fight where Colbert, O’Brien, and Jon Stewart seemed to be locked in a battle for the ages.
#Does stephen colbert read from a prompter series#
By far my favorite series of programs from this period involved an ongoing “feud” between Colbert and Conan O’Brien over which of them had been more instrumental in the then-surprising rise of Mike Huckabee (who briefly seemed to be the frontrunner for the 2008 Republican presidential nomination).
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The episodes they ended up making were loopy and gloriously silly, long on comedic bits that often had no real structure to them, yet were buoyed by the hosts’ willingness to just do whatever for a laugh. The hosts of late-night talk shows - including The Colbert Report’s Stephen Colbert, among others - were forbidden from working with their writing staffs, since the Writers Guild of America had declared a work stoppage. One of my favorite micro-moments in 21st-century TV history was what happened to late-night shows during the 2007–08 writers strike. In each edition, find one more thing from the world of culture that we highly recommend. One Good Thing is Vox’s recommendations feature.