It is well established that we here at Nat’s TV consider The Daily Show to be some form of wonderful, using an often-cutting parody of newscasters to deliver extremely pointed parodies of current events. One of the key practitioners has been Stephen Colbert, who plays the smug intellectual to a hilarious T.
But now Colbert has graduate to his own series, following The Daily Show four times a week. Judging from the first episode of The Colbert Report, it’s focusing on the parody of the newsmen, ripping apart commentary formats, and leaving the actual current events to The Daily Show. Even the scheduled guests for the week are all press folks, apparently doing their kindly in-on-the-joke-so-they-can’t-really-be-going-after-me appearances.
Problem is, as great as the gag is, spreading it out to two hours per week would seem to be spreading it far too thin. Commenting on events means that there is always fresh things to comment on; commenting solely on the deliverers of the news means one is playing with a limited range, one that renews slowly. One episode a week might be worthwhile (say, Friday at 11, taking the one weekday that The Daily Show doesn’t cover), but it’s hard to see even the talented Mr. Colbert keeping this from getting stale quickly at this rate.
Gilmore Girls tonight invoked one of my favorite place names. The real Chargoggagogmanchauggauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg isn’t the name of a street; it’s the name of a lake in Massachusetts, although in a rush people call it simply “Lake Webster”. (And yes, the name does supposedly mean “you fish on your side, I’ll fish on mine, and nobody’ll fish in the middle.”)
An article by Beth Gillin on The Colbert Report in today’s Philly Inquirer contains this paragraph:
I didn’t read the whole article myself, just the part that was on the front page of the Daily Magazine section (and I can’t see the show), but when I came across that paragraph my reaction was “Creation?!” How much of a creation can it be when Ted Knight was doing the same thing long ago as Ted Baxter on Mary Tyler Moore?
Now I’m sure there are differences in the approach and I would guess that this new show is probably a lot more subtle with the on-air personality stuff and the type of “reports”, but the way Ms. Gillin describes it it sounds like vintage Baxter to me.
…Just an off-the-cuff observation based solely on Ms. Gillin’s blurb of a description, so I’m sure it’s not fair on my part. Oh well.
I should clarify that The Colbert Report does indeed have current event content – it’s just that it’s silly coverage of trivia, rather than the laser-honed political commentary of The Daily Show.
Ted Baxter was hardly the first humorously overstatd fictional news anchor, although he certainly made the role his own.