Eric Deggans

And I'm not going to be bringing on people who hate me.

So it was kind of a very different show.

And I spoke to Roy Wood Jr., for example, who'd been a guest on the show many times, the comic.

And he said, you could never predict

where the conversation was gonna go when you went on Colbert because he might have a list of questions in front of him, but if something happened that he was interested in, he was gonna pursue that.

And so Colbert's legacy is kind of directing the show towards what he's passionate about, what he's interested in, and using that to entertain the audience.

And certainly his sense of fairness and morality and virtue and his sense that he's not necessarily anti-conservative, but I think he decided at some point

Trump violated a lot of the norms that he cherished in America and decided to lean into criticizing that.

And that led him to where we are now, where the bulk of his monologues now are jokes about Trump.

Not at all.

The other thing I would say is that I think times have changed.

And one of the things that is easy to miss is that the public now wants authenticity.

They would not tolerate, I don't think, a host like Carson who would come on and be like, hey, I'm this smooth, charismatic guy.

And then privately...

you know I'm a jerk.

TMZ and Radar Online would go crazy talking about the hidden side of Carson.

So these hosts have to be authentic.

They have to reveal themselves.

And I think that was what Colbert learned when he transitioned from, you know, he hosted the Colbert Report as a character.

He was playing a parody of a Fox News style conservative host.