This year's Emmys are on CBS. A Stephen Colbert win would be sweet revenge

Los Angeles Times

5 days ago

When I interviewed Stephen Colbert eight years ago, Donald Trump was in Year 1 of his first term in office and Colbert was finishing his second year of hosting his CBS late-night show.
'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert' had gotten off to a bumpy start as Colbert struggled to adapt to a new form and find his own voice after playing a 'well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot' for a decade on Comedy Central's late-night news satire 'The Colbert Report.'
'I was not indulging my own instincts,' Colbert told me of his tentative early days at CBS, adding later that he had 'stepped away from politics to a fault.'
When we spoke, Colbert's program was the No. 1 late-night talk show on the air by a wide margin.
Now, eight years later, déjà vu: Donald Trump is in Year 1 of his second term, and 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert' still reigns as the late-night ratings champ.
But there's one difference. As of next May, Colbert will no longer have a job with CBS, the network having canceled his show last month.
That abrupt move has led to all manner of anger (CBS' statement saying it was 'purely a financial decision' seems dubious) and hand-wringing (RIP late night). Colbert was the first to mock his newfound sainthood status. Noting that Trump had posted on social media that he absolutely loved that Colbert was fired, Colbert read Trump's follow-up post: 'I hear Jimmy Kimmel's next.'
'Absolutely not, Kimmel,' Colbert said. 'I am the martyr. There's only room for one on this cross and I gotta tell you, the view is fantastic. From up here, I can see your house.'
'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert' has never won a series Emmy, routinely bested in its early years by 'Last Week Tonight With John Oliver' until Oliver's wins became so routine that the Television Academy created an entirely new category, outstanding scripted variety series. Shuttling Oliver's show accomplished two things: It allowed some other program to take talk series (so far it's only been 'The Daily Show') and gave voters an easy out to finally stop voting for 'Saturday Night Live.'
But even if Colbert was competing this year against his fellow 'Daily Show' alum and old friend Oliver, you'd have to think that Emmy voters would be seizing the moment and giving Colbert's show its first Emmy, an award that would be well earned — and also make for a delicious piece of theater.
The 77th Primetime Emmy Awards will be held Sept. 14 at the Peacock Theater. The ceremony rotates among the four broadcast networks, and this year that broadcast partner happens to be CBS, whose parent company, Paramount Global, just landed Federal Communications Commission approval for its $8-billion merger with Skydance Media. That FCC thumbs-up came less than a month after Paramount paid $16 million to settle Trump's lawsuit against CBS News and a few days after CBS canceled Colbert (again, 'purely a financial decision').
This means that when (not if) 'The Late Show With Stephen Colbert' wins the talk series Emmy, Colbert will take the stage with his team and, one would presume, have something interesting to say.
I'm curious where he'll go. Colbert is gracious and polite, keeping a quote from the French Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin — 'Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God' — affixed to his computer and remembering the quote his parents would often invoke from French philosopher Léon Bloy, who said that the only sadness is not to be a saint.
'That's the great sadness, not to be perfect, meaning not to be a saint, not to see the world the way God does,' Colbert says. 'Which is that everyone is going through a battle you know nothing about.'
But Colbert also relishes a good fight and can't resist a verbal poke-in-the-eye when he feels it's warranted.
'How dare you, sir,' Colbert responded on air to Trump celebrating his show's demise. 'Could an untalented man be able to compose the following satirical witticism?' Pause. 'Go f— yourself.'
When Trump was first elected, Colbert told viewers, 'We drank too much of the poison' and that Americans needed to focus on what we have in common. Arguably, you could say that he has done just that in the ensuing years. Shouldn't we all share a common distaste for ever-widening income inequality, masked federal agents snatching people off our streets with no criminal convictions and rewriting history in the name of patriotism? (I could go on.)
But Colbert has also fallen short of his ideals.
'That poison cup, man,' he told me. 'It's very hard not to drink from. It's very tasty.'
Some say if Colbert didn't indulge so often in a taste (or, let's be real, a chug-a-lug) from that poison cup, his ratings would be better.
'Why shoot for just half an audience all the time? You know, why not try to get the whole?' former 'Tonight Show' host Jay Leno recently told Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation Chief Executive David Trulio. 'I don't understand why you would alienate one particular group. I'm not saying you have to throw your support or whatever, but just do what's funny.'
Was Leno ever funny on 'The Tonight Show'? That's a question for another time. But, yes, the politicization of late-night shows hasn't helped their ratings, though the dominance of the internet and social media have played more of a role in the format's decline, a fact Colbert acknowledged after the cancellation.
'Some people see this show going away as a sign of something truly dire,' he said. 'And while I am a big fan of me, I don't necessarily agree with that statement. Because we here at 'The Late Show' never saw our job as changing anything other than how you felt at the end of the day, which I think is a worthy goal — or, rather, changing how you felt the next morning when you watched on your phone, which is why broadcast TV is dying.'
And, yes, I watched that clip not on my television in real time, but on my phone the next day.