The final “Late Show” episode ever tried to just be a normal “Late Show” episode, until it couldn’t.
Host Stephen Colbert — in an impossible position since his firing was announced last July, nearly a year before his final episode was to air — creditably did a full-jokes monologue, and then kept telling jokes at the desk. (Notably, he avoided mentioning President Trump, whose first-term rise to prominence fueled Colbert’s own success at CBS, and whose second-term quest for revenge may well have shut it down.) The funniest moment in the show’s first half was Colbert’s mentioning a lawsuit mounted by the composer of the famous “Peanuts” music, after which his band picked up the “Linus and Lucy” theme, as if to threaten a lawsuit against CBS. It was a very funny bit! Colbert’s firing is unfair, and he is right to have some fun.
But Colbert couldn’t, ultimately, escape being Colbert as the episode wore on, and the final program sadly proved the case for his show’s obsolescence. Unfortunately, this host is gifted at neither interview nor sketch. In the former, he talked over Paul McCartney — a well-chosen guest, given his connection, as a Beatle, to the Ed Sullivan Theater — relentlessly. In one particularly inartful moment, Colbert attempted to pull rank on McCartney by asking if he’d ever met the Pope. (McCartney hadn’t; Colbert had, which is why he asked — to brag about it. But then, McCartney is a Beatle.) This called back a strange and underdone bit in which an actor playing Pope Leo said the hot dogs in the Ed Sullivan Theater didn’t meet his rider, and shook his fist from behind a dressing-room door.
