Bloggers Pleased, Nervous With New Colbert Program

Comedy Central broadened its "news" programming to include a new show Monday night, the intensely over-promoted " Colbert Report," starring the former "Daily Show" correspondent Stephen Colbert as the hyper-serious Everyanchor, with a good measure of Bill O'Reilly mixed in. (It's our no. 19 link today.) After two episodes nobody's quite sure what to make of the show, and Colbert and his production team seem like they too are struggling to find just the right mix. Colbert so far has interviewed two TV journalists, Stone Phillips and Leslie Stahl, and seemed uncertain whether to poke fun at them or ask serious questions. Bloggers have responded to the show with warm but reserved praise, as in this Wonkette post, in which she's generally complimentary but starts out by saying the show "tests the boundaries of just how long one can stand arch irony." TV Squad is nervous about the show, worrying "it might be too similar to 'The Daily Show,' that it'll be too much of character-Colbert, that the set might come crashing down... I'm worried about a lot of things, really." If you're interested in a blow-by-blow account/review of the premiere, you'd be hard-pressed to beat this blog post, which has time-indexed responses to the first episode. We're holding off until the first week or so has aired before saying more, but we did think the gravitas-off with Stone Phillips was pretty funny, especially when Phillips intoned, in his anchor voice, "In the interest of full disclosure, I should state that this reporter has a similar body piercing."

Posted by Philip Ewing at October 19, 2005 10:26 AM

Category: On The Telly