Photo: Todd Owyoung/NBC via Getty Images
Welcome back to the first post-Olympics week of late-night TV. Jimmy Kimmel Live! took the most advantage of the ’lympos this week by interviewing Chloe Kim and asking the hardest questions. Namely, “Do you know where you are in the sky?” about figuring out where to land while snowboarding, and how to know when someone has made an AI version of you. And the answers were (1) No, but I figure it out before I land, and (2) Fashion. Look it up, darling.
But when it comes to which show had the most eventful Olympics hiatus, it had to be The Late Show, which stood in defiance of Brendan Carr’s interpretation of equal-time rules. Stephen Colbert asserted that he could interview who he wishes. CBS said, “Well …” Colbert’s show countered, “So that’s a no? So we’ll put an interview on YouTube and note that it’s on YouTube because you said we can’t air it?” CBS responded, “Well …” And so on and so forth for one calendar week. It resulted in continued equivocations from CBS and boffo YouTube hits for The Late Show. But the problem with Donald Trump is that he keeps moving the conversation. Last week, Colbert was the pioneer; this week, he’s doing the last live Late Show ever, something one can’t help but think of in retrospective terms. It’s a humdinger, but one Stephen Colbert will soon be free of.
The zoomer-lingo-explainer segment (whose name has changed enough throughout the years that they had to comment on it) has been a stalwart Late Show desk piece for years now. It’s what Eliana Kwartler probably put on her dating writers’ room pitch deck, which she made Stephen Colbert read ahead of his show’s cancellation. Kwartler used her time on the Ed Sullivan stage perfectly.
A hearty thank-you/fuck you to Jenny Slate for opening up the world of “Peter Pan fails” YouTube to me. The full acting out of a specific high-school-production version of Wendy was absolutely diabolical. Late Night With Seth Meyers had its 12th anniversary this week, and it’s beautiful that the breakout moment was from a former Saturday Night Live performer — specifically a former SNL performer being meaner and more specific and sharper than they were on SNL. It’s an entire show made of “Second Chance Theater.”
Not since the one-two punch of Mike Myers’s and Guy Branum’s memoirs have I learned so much about the Canadian parliamentary system. Desi Lydic invaded Jon Stewart’s night of The Daily Show to fujoshi out and and slam Canada in the wake of it losing our international hockey/government/gay-sex competition. Since the U.S. won the gold medal, it also won “best government” and “person who tells the ambiently homophobic ‘deez nutz’ jokes about the losing team.” Every detail of Canadian/American (and the slash here is intentionally indicating a romantic relationship versus a friend or co-worker vibe) civics was sillier than the last. Shout-out to Lydic for taking the joke as far as it could go and no further. Shout-out to Stewart for following up this gorgeous set piece with a killer joke about the Iraq War being sold on a “Marty Supreme–level press tour.”
More like the State of the P.Union, am I right? Because it stinks? The best Trump comedy for this deeply unpopular and interminable SOTU was on Jimmy Kimmel Live! They just condensed it into one big beautiful super-cut. The editors on JKL! are the tightest on late night, and they hone it every “have you ever noticed local-news anchors say the same thing?” montage they do. If anything, they are too powerful at this point.
What a gift to have Tracy Morgan promoting a new show while his SNL pal Jimbo is hosting The Tonight Show. Morgan disregarded every anecdote setup during his The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins press tour. He’s gonna talk about impregnating Cher and being afraid of AI, and you’re going to like it! Fallon 100 percent knew to get out of Morgan’s way. It was a really special interplay to behold. This was two old pals knowing exactly how to approach each other, like Christmas With the Martins and the Sinatras for Tina Fey fans — if only because Tracy Jordan being Cher’s secret baby daddy feels like a season-five 30 Rock joke.