The CBS Television Network today announced that Stephen Colbert, the host, writer and executive producer of the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning The Colbert Report, will succeed David Letterman as the host of THE LATE SHOW, effective when Mr. Letterman retires from the broadcast.
(CBS, April 10, 2014)
Folks, Steven Colbert hosting THE LATE SHOW as himself is like Bozo the clown entertaining a birthday party without his familiar makeup and costume.
This is a big mistake – no matter how funny the real Colbert is. He has done such a good job of acting as if the right-wing nut on The Colbert Report is who he really is that, every time he appears, the audience will expect him to act the way that Colbert would and say what that Colbert would; especially given that he will still look the way that Colbert would.
This really is like Jon Stewart suddenly trying to anchor the CBS Evening News. That dog won’t hunt.
Indeed, this was brought into foreboding relief last year when Colbert returned to his home state of South Carolina to campaign for his sister’s congressional bid. She was pitted against the state’s disgraced former governor, Mark Sanford, who became a national laughing stock when he tried to explain going AWOL while in office by saying that he was hiking the Appalachian Trail; in fact, he was on a romantic rendezvous with his mistress down in Argentina. Yet voters were apparently so confused by Colbert campaigning as himself — but acting, sounding, and looking so much like his buffoonish TV character — that they thought his sister’s campaign was just a big joke. She lost, badly.
But my real beef is that CBS refused to break the tradition of casting only White guys to host these plum late-night shows. Okay, so Arsenio Hall returned to his hosting gig recently. But he appears to have fallen into a TV black hole. The point is that, with all the truly witty and intelligent female comedians working today, like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, and Chelsea Handler, you’d think the purportedly liberal executives at CBS would’ve … tapped one of them.
Meanwhile, apropos of casting Whites only, what’s with Woody Allen featuring only White actors in his play, Bullets Over Broadway, which opens tonight? It’s clearly his artistic prerogative. But you’d think a play that has so much to do with Harlem’s famous Cotton Club would feature more than just one token Black … as an extra. After all, even though it catered to “Whites-only,” this club routinely featured the most famous Black musicians of the Jazz Age in which the play is set:
‘Everyone’s white at Woody’s Cotton Club and in the gangster numbers,’ says our well-placed Broadway insider. ‘Casting was considering a big-name African-American actor for the play, but Woody passed because he just got the idea that a Black gangster wouldn’t be good. One man wasn’t asked back and then was told it was Woody who didn’t want any Black gangsters.’
(The Daily News, April 10, 2014)
I’m sure Woody would insist that casting Whites only in this play (or in his movies for that matter) does not make him a racist. Except that this is a man who insists that seducing and then marrying girlfriend Mia Farrow’s daughter (for whom he was a father figure since she was 10) does not make him a pervert; never mind suspicions that he’s also a pedophile who molested his and Mia’s seven-year-old daughter.
WTF indeed.
* This commentary was originally published yesterday, Thursday, at 7:44 pm