Three weeks before Stephen Colbert’s Late Show will air its final episode, the host revealed that he feared being fired at the very beginning.
Colbert told the story of how the show’s first episode in 2015 almost didn’t air in Q&A session with his live audience. “I don’t see them giving us a second show,” Colbert recalled thinking, as he and the show’s editors couldn’t get the finished episode sent to the network for broadcast, just minutes before their scheduled airtime. “We didn’t really know what we were doing in terms of producing,” he said.
“We knew our comedy; we just didn’t know how to produce the show yet. And it was not the same as Colbert Report—much bigger, much more complicated,” he said, referring to his previous talk show on Comedy Central. “You know, we didn’t realize how much more complicated it would be,” he prefaced. When it came time to get the first-ever episode on the airwaves, the show’s team ran into a huge problem that they had very little time to fix. “The show will not export, meaning it won’t come out of the Avid editing machine, and it will not go.”
“Every time we try to export, it crashes at exactly the same point… a minute-30ish into the monologue,” he explained, describing the panic he felt. “And then it won’t go to the broadcast center to be sent to the world, and this goes on and on and on, and we go on at 11:35, and it’s our first show, and it’s 11:15, and I’m thinking somebody should tell the network.”
“Meanwhile, my entire family has come from all over the globe to be here for my first night. They’re at a party across town, including everybody I know, all of our friends. I’m not there. I’m on the seventh floor waiting for the show to export,” he continued, adding that he thought he would “have the shortest late-night career.”
“I don’t see us giving us a second show if that happened on the first show,” he admitted, though others told him he was panicking prematurely. “All the tech people are like, ‘It’s going to be fine, man.” I’m like, ‘On what do you base that analysis? You’ve been trying to export that show for two hours.”
Ultimately, it was one of the host’s editors, Jason Baker, who decided he’d take a big risk to get the show on the air. “He goes, ‘Man, I’m going to push this button here. We’re going to feed it directly from my Avid,” Colbert recalled Baker saying.
“‘It’s going to come from my computer, and people are going to see it all over the world from my computer on this floor,’” Baker explained.
Without any other option, Colbert said he decided to grab some bourbon and hold his breath. “I kicked open one of the accounting doors, and we went in there with a bottle, I think, of Old Forester bourbon. About six of us went in there, and there is a photo of the moment the show got past that minute-30 mark, and it actually was going to work.”
The rest is history, he said.
“That is one of the fondest memories that I’ll have and one of the most terrifying moments,” he said. The reflection comes ahead of The Late Show’s final episode on Tuesday, May 21, after months of verbally sparring with the president.
CBS parent company Paramount insisted that Colbert’s show was cut for “financial reasons” last year, bucking speculation that the move was fealty to Donald Trump.
Colbert revealed to the New York Times last week that the company had previously wanted to lock him into a five-year contract. “Less than two years before they called to say it’s over, they were very eager for me to be signed for a long time. So, something changed,” he told the Times.
