TV Watch: Two excellent things about CBS's choice of Stephen Colbert to succeed David Letterman

Rush asks over and over, do we really care what he thinks about it? Great point, Rush! Who in his right mind could possibly care? Except for the fact that you've got still got a lot of people listening to you who aren't in their right mind.

by Ken

It really seems as if some note should be taken of the news that Stephen Colbert has been named to succeed David Letterman as host of CBS's Late Show -- at some date to be determined next year after Dave finally packs it in.

Two things occur to me -- both good, let me hasten to say. I'm certainly not claiming that they're profound. In fact, it mayt be their very obviousness that makes them so, well, obvious.

(1) Stephen C is wicked smart, and wicked funny, and a long-experienced entertainer, and also has an uncommon awareness of the world around him and a seemingly deep-rooted attachment to truth, as opposed to the commodity of "truthiness" he gave a name to. What's more his worldview is (and I'm sorry that these are terrible words; they're just the best I could come up with) idiosyncratic and offbeat relative to the run of career comics who tend to slide into network late-night chairs -- in other words, a really apt successor to Dave. (And I speak here as someone whose experience of Dave-watching goes back to his NBC daytime show.)

(2) We really don't know who the Stephen Colbert of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert (or whatever CBS chooses to call the extravaganaza) will be. The standard word is that he will be dropping the persona -- of a fake-right-wing blowhard -- that he created for his Comedy Central show. But then, that persona wasn't all that different from the personae we saw during his time with The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, where his tone was carefully modulated to that of the story he was presenting.

I don't doubt we're going to see a different Stephen C from the ones we've seen before, and since we haven't seen it yet, we can't know what it's going to be. Given the list of qualities/qualifications I listed above, I'm not at all bothered by this. In fact, I think it's rather fun. I'm guessing, though, that whoever or whatever the new Stephen C turns out to be, he's not going to be all that unrecognizable.

In this connection, you might want to take a look at washingtonpost.com's Alyssa Rosenberg's "Five parts of Stephen Colbert's fictional persona he should bring to 'The Late Show.'" My guess is that Stephen C isn't going to abandon anything he thinks might work for him in the context of his new format and audience. After all, he has to hope that one important component of that audience is going to be his present one.

Meanwhile, there's a question getting attention that I probably wouldn't have troubled with on my own but that seems to me to have legitimacy, and undoubtedly was agonized over by the responsible CBS executives: What about the Right?

One answer is Rush Limbaugh's already-famous one, as discussed atop this post by The Young Turks. In case we care about the view of a giant sack of stinky caca. By contrast, Aaron Blake of washingtonpost.com's "The Fix" blog has addressed this question in a fairly interesting way (lots links onsite):

Conservatives largely silent on CBS’s pick of Colbert

BY AARON BLAKE

April 10 at 3:04 pm

In its new "Late Show" host, CBS has picked someone who has been bashing conservatives for years using his faux-conservative newsman persona.

But to this point, conservatives have been largely quiet -- and some have even been favorable -- about the pick of Stephen Colbert.

Conservative talker Rush Limbaugh is about the one big-name conservative to speak out against Colbert so far. On his show Thursday, he called the selection of Colbert the equivalent of declaring "war on the Heartland of America."

"No longer is comedy going to be a covert assault on traditional American values, conservatives," Limbaugh said. "There's no unity in this hire. They've hired a partisan, so-called comedian to run a comedy show."

But as Chris Cillizza notes over on The Fix, one conservative radio host even appeared to praise the pick:



Despite regularly lampooning conservatives, Colbert has often been somewhat cagey about his own personal politics, as Cillizza notes.

But he has also said quite clearly that he's liberal.

During an appearance on NPR in 2005, Colbert said he discovered his liberal politics while building his persona as a correspondent on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart."

"Jon asked me to have a political opinion, and it turned out that I had one," Colbert said. "But I didn't realize quite how liberal I was until I was asked to make passionate comedic choices, as opposed to necessarily successful comedic choices."

In the end, I think a good part of the answer to the question "What about the Right?" is another question: How many hard-core right-wingers have been serious Dave-watchers?

Lotsa luck, Stephen C! It should be interesting.

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