“If you’re just tuning in to ‘The Late Show,’ you missed a lot,” said Stephen Colbert to open his final monologue during the last episode of his late-night CBS talk show.
Are we ever going to miss him. A lot.
Colbert left the air with laughter, grace, surprise celebrities, a pinch of quirkiness and a few well-placed digs at CBS for canceling the top-rated program for “purely financial reasons,” as some dolphins squeaked in dolphin-speak as a punch line.
The monologue: After admitting that he and his staff wanted to do a big special at first but then realized every night is special to them, Colbert launched into a regular monologue peppered with interruptions from stars in the audience — Bryan Cranston, Paul Rudd and Detroit’s own Tim Meadows — who all wanted to be guests.
Rudd said he brought the traditional retirement gift of six bananas, er, five because he got hungry and ate one. Then Meadows stormed off in fury after finding out he wasn’t the final guest. “Screw you, Colbert. … Gimme those bananas!” he shouted.
“Meanwhile”: Colbert reprised his popular segment on minor news stories one last time and fielded two more star cameos from the audience: Tig Notaro, who didn’t realize it was the finale, and Ryan Reynolds, who gave six bananas to the band’s keyboardist Corey Bernhard.
Final guest: As Colbert launched into introducing his final, “infallible” guest, aka Pope Leo, a staffer informed him that the head of the Catholic Church wouldn’t come out of his dressing room because “The Late Show” goofed up on the pope’s rider for snacks.
Cut to a white-robed arm sticking out of the green room, the hand clutching a hot dog while someone with a thick “da Bears” accent, and clearly not from the Vatican, said, “No way, Colbert! You call that a Chicago dog?… Leo, out!”
As Colbert bemoaned who could fill in, living legend Paul McCartney casually strolled onstage. Quipping that he was in the area doing some errands, McCartney said he had brought a gift. It was not bananas, but a large framed photo of the Beatles appearing about 62 years ago at the same Ed Sullivan Theater that houses “The Late Show.”
McCartney shared some memories of that epic guest spot, recalling how the Sullivan team put “bright orange” makeup on them. Colbert replied that the shade is quite popular in some circles, a reference to the president who called for Colbert’s cancellation and celebrated when CBS followed his advice in advance of a multibillion-dollar merger that needed FCC approval.
The technical difficulty: Throughout the show, an odd, rumbling sound and glowing green light kept surfacing. To figure out the problem, Colbert went backstage where a giant, swirling force field sucked his Apple watch off his wrist.
Then science guru Neil DeGrasse Tyson popped up to explain that the blob was an “interdimensional wormhole” caused by the contradiction of CBS canceling its top-rated late-night talk show. After warning that the wormhole could rupture the space-time continuum and destroy all late-night-TV, Tyson was swallowed by it.
Fortunately, Jon Stewart appeared to do some spit takes and tell Colbert that he could control whether he would go kicking and screaming into the hole or, as he had through so many recent dark times, “stare it down and laugh.”
Then the other four members of the Strike Force Five podcast — Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon and John Oliver — arrived for support. Kimmel told the hole to get out because “for the next 12 minutes, Colbert is the only one in this theater who is going to suck!”
Then, as Colbert returned to the stage, the hole began to consume everything in the theater, including the host.
The ending: In a sequence that was as surreal and as mournfully beautiful as a Fellini film, Colbert emerged from the hole into an empty room and proceeded to sing the song “Jump Up” with the man who wrote it, Elvis Costello, and his former and current bandleaders, Jon Batiste and Louis Cato. As it concluded, Colbert looked at the camera and said, “Goodnight.” Fade to black.
But that wasn’t really the end. The show continued back onstage as Paul McCartney, joined by Colbert, performed the 1967 Beatles classic “Hello, Goodbye,” a sweet hint that Colbert may only be taking a short career break. As the song rang out, Colbert’s family and other members of the audience came onstage in a joyful celebration that felt right for the moment.
The kicker: The last few seconds featured Colbert inviting McCartney to turn off the electricity to the Ed Sullivan Theater, which caused the building to disappear into the wormhole and left behind a small object that clattered to the ground. It was a snow globe with the theater inside, which, as any child of broadcast television knows, was a reference to the famous 1988 ending of “St. Elsewhere” that suggested the events portrayed as real in the medical drama were a figment of a character’s imagination.
It was smart, whimsical and unexpected. How perfectly Colbert of an ending.
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@freepress.com.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Stephen Colbert’s farewell ‘Late Show’ included a last-minute twist
Reporting by Julie Hinds, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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