James Poniewozik

I don't know that Stephen Colbert...

wanted Donald Trump to become his assigning editor and sort of give him his topic.

But whether he sought it out or deeply regretted it, he found his voice and his show found his voice at a time when politics was pop culture.

Through Trump and then through Biden and then through Trump again, The Late Show manages to find a way to be sort of pointed and topically engaged while also entertaining and for years stays the number one rated late night talk show in its time slot.

You really see Stephen Colbert presiding over what I would call the peak period of late-night political comedy.

There are still other people doing it, but it feels with him going like something is ending.

It's putting a period on something, even if we don't necessarily know what's coming next.

It was a year of mild improvement, I think.

Beautiful.

From my standpoint.

Okay.

When I put together my, you know, end of the year best list, most years it is a wrestling match trying to eliminate the last few things to get the list down to 10 or some approximation of that.

I would say last year...

not to crap on 2024 too much, but was one of the few years where, you know, I just, I basically had 10 and I was good.

And one of them was the Olympics.

You know, this year, I think we were, I'm not going to say that it was just a blow the doors off year for television, but...

But it was a much more normal distribution of going down to the wire and cutting things off the list.

So that's a positive note for me.

Oh, there was, where do I start?

Common side effects, severance, the chair company, the lowdown, pluribus.