When the comic Stephen Colbert hosted the final episode of “The Late Show” on CBS on Thursday, he advised his viewers that the following place they might most probably see him was on public-access tv in Michigan.
Seems, that was no joke.
On Friday night time, Colbert hosted an episode of “Only in Monroe,” which covers the happenings of Monroe, Mich., a city of about 20,000 individuals roughly 40 miles southwest of Detroit.
“It’s been an excruciating 23 hours with out being on TV,” Colbert mentioned close to the start of the hourlong program, “so I’m grateful to have the ability to be right here on Monroe Group Media earlier than in addition they get acquired by Paramount.” (The cancellation of “The Late Present” coincided with the purchase of ParamountCBS’s mother or father company, by the media firm Skydance.)
Friday’s episode of “Solely in Monroe,” which aired on the identical time that “The Late Present” did, shared the same construction. Colbert opened with a monologue filled with jokes concerning the present’s small-scale operation and the city’s expertise with a Huge Foot sighting. At one level, Colbert requested if the beer Milwaukee’s Greatest was a sponsor. “They’re not,” Colbert mentioned to somebody off digicam. “And we don’t have any sponsors, and we truly misplaced some huge cash making the present tonight? Now I understand how CBS felt.”
The present’s common hosts, Michelle Baumann and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko Wilson (a.okay.a. Miss America 1988), have been his first visitors. Jack White, who grew up in Detroit, served because the musical director, enjoying songs on a boombox and a reel-to-reel participant. Byron Allen, the comic turned entrepreneur whose present “Comics Unleashed” took over the “Late Present” time slot, made an look, as did the rapper Eminem. Each are from Michigan.
The actor Steve Buscemi made a cameo in what he referred to as a public service announcement for an area restaurant: Buscemi’s Pizza & Subs (no relation).
Colbert dished with visitors all through the present, took pictures of an alcohol distilled close by, taste-tested Monroe-style chili canines (although the present appeared to neglect which sizzling canine got here from which restaurant) and made peanut butter, potato chip and barbecue sauce sandwiches with the actor Jeff Daniels, who lives in Michigan.
Colbert, for his half, was born in Washington, D.C., and raised in South Carolina. However his look on “Solely in Monroe” was truly a homecoming. He first hosted an episode of the present in 2015, a few months earlier than taking the reins of “The Late Present” from David Letterman. That point, he additionally interviewed the common hosts of “Solely in Monroe,” and likewise welcomed Eminem, whom he launched as “an area Michigander who’s making a reputation for himself within the aggressive world of music.”
Colbert had not forgotten about that have greater than a decade later. Throughout his final “Late Show” episode on Thursday, he reminded his viewers of that look, telling them that the present had attracted an viewers of a dozen individuals. “Present enterprise being what it’s nowadays,” he mentioned, “that’s most likely the place you’ll see me subsequent.”
Friday’s model of “Solely in Monroe” ended with Colbert and his visitors taking hammers to the present’s set, after which lighting it on hearth in a dumpster exterior.
