A cameraman circles around him, and Mr. Colbert looks directly into the lenses and says, “Hey.” Mr. Licht said Mr. Colbert had started doing
that on his own just about three months ago, a brief, intimate moment between the host and the viewer, watching at home, right before bed.
How an Election Surprise Helped Stephen Colbert Find His Elusive Groove -
Mr. Colbert has done what was unthinkable a year ago: turned “The Late Show” into the most viewed show in late night.
“On the old show, all of us handled all those responsibilities,” Mr. Colbert said, acknowledging that the CBS show was a much bigger undertaking.
Sensing the gravity of the moment, Chris Licht, the executive producer of “The Late Show
With Stephen Colbert,” walked over to Mr. Colbert’s desk during a musical performance.
“You cannot do two weeks of live shows and be a control freak.”
Mr. Colbert became much more forgiving of “a flub here or a flub there,” Mr. Licht said.
Mr. Colbert had done, by his estimation, about a dozen live shows over 10 years at “The Colbert Report.” Over the past nine months, he has done 15.
“Two weeks of that changed all of our approach to the show, and it also changed the trust I had to place in my staff,” Mr. Colbert said.
When Mr. Moonves approached him about Mr. Colbert, Mr. Licht said he didn’t watch the show; he quickly burned through several episodes.
What followed was what Mr. Licht described in a recent interview as the turning point for Mr. Colbert, who had struggled to gain his footing on CBS after shedding the pompous-pundit character
that made him famous on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report.”
“I think it’s when he became himself,” he said.
