CBS Can Take ‘The Late Show’ Off Streaming, but I’ll Never Forget Working for Stephen Colbert

1 hour ago 9

On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.

First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”

The Bait: That Time I Bombed Standing in for Stephen Colbert

For reasons I won’t speculate about in print, the complete July 31, 2017 episode of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” is no longer available on Paramount+. That’s a shame, because it’s our pick for this week’s After Dark, and the only time I ever performed on the Ed Sullivan stage… and bombed. Badly.

IndieWire Honors Spring 2026 host Dewayne Perkins.

At least, that’s how I felt then. I was an intern during “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” Season 2, moving from Atlanta to Manhattan for the job immediately after graduating from college. Nearly a decade later, I still don’t think any professional call has made me happier than learning I got that internship. New York represented everything I’d imagined adulthood could be and more. Late night television felt not just impossibly glamorous but also casually cool. Plus, the Ed Sullivan stage itself was sacred ground.

An excuse to walk the same hallways David Letterman once haunted, that summer brought out a level of ambition and desperation in me so powerful, I routinely became a caricature of myself. Yes, long before I was an effortlessly chic indie film critic and reporter in Los Angeles, I was essentially a post-graduate Tracy Flick looking for any and all “Late Show” odd jobs. I volunteered for every task I could find, and even engineered several of my own — reorganizing closets, offering my tech services, and generally behaving like someone Stephen probably shouldn’t let follow him home.

Nobody required that intensity of me, and in hindsight, no full-time staffers were particularly demanding of my intern class. Still, any live performance environment — particularly one that satirizes politics — can grow tense, and I was terrified of screwing up. That’s why I was already running on fumes when I got called downstairs from the production offices for a mysterious assignment inside the main theater.

The daily “Late Show” workplace and actual Ed Sullivan stage operated as largely separate worlds when I was there, and after an incident involving a high-profile band manager (whose identity will remain buried in the NDA I probably signed while onboarding), the interns weren’t exactly encouraged to wander around the set. That made any excuse to enter the auditorium special, and I needed to feel special.

That day, Colbert wasn’t onstage. Instead, there was a mostly empty theater and a replica set from Colbert’s earlier sketch series, “Exit 57.” He made that scripted show even before “The Colbert Report,” and guest Matthew McConaughey had apparently requested they recreate one of his favorite bits from it as part of his upcoming appearance on “The Late Show.” Another intern and I were handed scripts and asked to stand in for the performers while various departments worked out the segment’s logistics.

As the crew rehearsed camera moves, prop placement, and blocking, my anxiety nearly bubbled over. The scene took place in the cramped office of a top news editor (Colbert/me), where he was confronted by an angry weatherman (Mitch Rouse/McConaughey/intern No. 2) who was upset that his most recent forecast had been sensationalized in the paper’s latest edition. It’s a funny idea in theory, but reading directly from the page, every joke we tried landed with a thud. My fellow intern and I weren’t being recorded, and no one expected us to be funny. But I remember feeling crushed that we hadn’t torn the house down.

Jeffrey R. Staab/©CBS/courtesy Everett Collection

At 21, I wanted so badly to belong inside the Ed Sullivan Theater that even bombing during a fake rehearsal for an audience that wasn’t there felt like a professional catastrophe. Leaving the stage, I remember trying not to cry and wondering if Colbert could even make the scene funny. That night, he and McConaughey hit the material full force and their fans filled the room with laughter (but I’ll admit, even watching the clip on YouTube now, I’m still a little mystified by the sketch’s absurdist setup.)

The irony is that one of my favorite things about working at “The Late Show” was watching Colbert himself finesse jokes that, for whatever reason, weren’t working. I’d arrived at the Ed Sullivan Theater as more of a Letterman freak than a Comedy Central aficionado, but seeing Colbert rewrite and refine material during rehearsals permanently changed how I thought about the precision of timing and language in storytelling. One of Colbert’s assistants once said she thought he was a “genius.” Watching him adjust pacing, sharpen punchlines, and reshape segments in real time made me certain he was.

“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” also taught me something else. As much as I admired production, I didn’t actually want to spend my career making late night television. I wanted to write about TV and movies, and possibly do interviews of my own. By the end of my internship, I’d been hired elsewhere in the building to work on Showtime’s “Our Cartoon President” (another Colbert-produced project that’s even harder to see than my long-lost episode of “The Late Show”). But the more time I spent watching how both series got made, the more fascinated I became with the people behind them.

Late night programming has been magical for decades because it makes every evening on planet Earth feel like a sleepover. Looking back now, I only wish I’d enjoyed actually being inside that theater more completely in the moment. “The Late Show” felt like an exclusive club that I just had to get into — making even the fun assignments, like standing in for a silly acting joke, skew slightly existential back then.

Years later, whenever my new role in the entertainment world felt difficult, I maintained a private fantasy. One day, I told myself, I’d return to the Ed Sullivan… as a guest. Colbert would sit down across from me at his real desk, and we’d talk about movies, politics, maybe both. And the best part? He would remember me. Not as a nervous intern who wouldn’t stop stealing yogurt cups and notebooks, but as a witty conversationalist who band leader Jon Baptiste himself once called “pretty funny” long ago.

Now, I find myself nostalgic for the version of me who really stood on that stage already feeling the draft of Colbert’s absence. Pop culture is always changing, and even now, it’s not unusual for Hollywood institutions to disappear. But I’m still heartbroken that “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” is gone, as a show and a place. If CBS wants to remove the one episode I ever saw as “mine” from streaming, too? That’s fine. We didn’t deserve to spend our nights with the real king of comedy, anyway (that’s the job of one Mrs. Evelyn Colbert, who, yes, smells really good in person.) —Alison Foreman

The Bite: A Vital Blast From the (Not-Too Distant) Past

Late night has long been the most ephemeral of art forms. Produced rapidly and in response to breaking headlines, for decades talk shows built their legacies on hundreds and thousands of episodes, rather than the strength of one specific standout installment.

The emergence of the internet and digital avenues to preserve art has made it easier for late night to be revisited, but has conversely reduced the average viewer’s experience of these shows to bite-sized chunks. Nowadays, younger audiences don’t sit down to watch 30 minutes of “Jimmy Kimmel Live” or “Late Night with Seth Meyers” while eating dinner or folding laundry. They consume these shows via clips distributed to the internet — with the highlights and most memorable moments chopped up and sent out to the online void in the hope something goes viral.

With all episodes of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” removed from Paramount+ outside of the most recent season, you can’t watch the full July 31, 2017 episode of the long-running talk show without searching very, very hard in some illegal places. That said, you can go to “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” YouTube page and crawl through its archives for the six clips that have been uploaded. It’s a viewing experience that doesn’t really capture what makes late night valuable, the sweat and effort that goes into producing an hour of comedy and conversations.

Still, watching fragments of this specific episode proved an enjoyable blast from a not too-distant but somehow very different past. If this is a slightly offbeat choice for a midnight movie column, there’s something to be said about the surreality of viewing such an immediate and reactive artform from nearly 10 years of distance. Does anybody think much about Anthony Scaramucci anymore? I had totally forgotten about the very brief tenure of the White House Chief of Staff, who lasted just 10 days at the job in 2017. But in this episode, which premiered shortly after his dismissal, it’s the breaking news of the moment: the opening skit shows his nameplate on an office replaced by Ted Nugent, the Twitter logo, and “Voices in my head,” while Colbert’s monologue is a light and cheerful roasting of “the Mooch,” complete with a parody version of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

To some extent, this material reads a little soft now, but it’s also in its own way important that it’s preserved. Late night can offer a valuable window and historical document of what people were thinking during the first Trump administration, let alone the second. And with Colbert’s cancellation, it also serves as a bitter reminder of how even mild satire can feel radical now.

And it goes without saying that watching these clips demonstrates what made Colbert an excellent late night host for 11 years. He’s quick on his feet in his monologue, and warm, inquisitive, and natural in his interviews with Matthew McConaughey and Vanessa Bayer. Even if the projects the guests are promoting are old news (I laughed out loud when I realized McConaughey was there for “The Dark Tower” press run), it’s a pleasant to slip into these conversations and see a seasoned pro guide an interview properly.

With “The Late Show” over after a 33-year-run, late night feels like a nearly dead art form, but crawling through Colbert’s YouTube page reveals plenty of jewels. Take the time to go through and see why he’s amazing, and why late night is still vital — for however long Paramount lets it stay up. —Wilson Chapman

“The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” Season 11 is now streaming on Paramount+.

Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie club: