With just days until the end of The Late Show, Stephen Colbert is spending a good portion of his week on memory lane. The host kicked things off last night with an episode dubbed “The Worst Of The Late Show,” which cataloged exactly what it sounds like it would catalog. The worst guests, the worst graphics, and, of course, the worst field pieces. The latter segment is, if nothing else, probably the most expensive of The Late Show‘s flops. As Colbert explains at the top of the segment, many of these were fully shot and produced, sometimes including travel but were pulled from the broadcast “for a variety of reasons, ranging from I wasn’t sure if America would like them, to I was sure America wouldn’t like them.”
Some of them seemed like good ideas but just didn’t yield enough jokes to be worthwhile, like sending Bootsie Plunkett, a recurring guest on the show to host the “Uninformed Correspondent” segment, into a haunted house to discuss healthcare in between panicked screams, or sending a correspondent to a pugs-against-Trump rally, which yielded just one good joke. Others were just rather self-indulgent, the kind of thing that’s only really interesting to the person who’s actually there. One of these was a 90s convention (“The piece was shot and fully edited and was slated to air… but we never did because at the last minute we realized it was not good,” says Colbert) and another was a trip Colbert and Paul Dinello took to Chicago to visit their old haunts. The segment is cute enough, but probably a lot more interesting with the knowledge that this phase of Colbert’s career is through. “I can see why we didn’t run that,” says a pretty sober Colbert at the end. “That was okay.”
For his final week, Colbert has a slate of well-respected guests on his docket, including Jon Stewart, Bruce Springsteen, David Byrne, and Steven Spielberg. The Late Show has promised some other surprises, and still hasn’t announced who might show up for Colbert’s last show on Thursday. In the meantime, you can watch the entire, extended “The Worst Of The Late Show” below.
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