Stephen Colbert is turning his Late Show into a podcast
The TV version will continue, but now you can also just listen to The Late Show with your ears
It’s been a few years since Conan O’Brien invented podcasts, with his Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend show quickly becoming such a hit that he doesn’t even do his regular TV show anymore. (That’s not really why he stopped doing his regular TV show, which will live on in some form on HBO Max eventually anyway, but we’re making a tongue-in-cheek point here as it is.)
Other TV hosts have followed O’Brien into podcasting, like Samantha Bee, Seth Meyers, and Trevor Noah, and now they’ll finally be joined by Stephen Colbert. According to Deadline, Colbert’s Late Show is launching a new daily podcast next week called The Late Show Pod Show With Stephen Colbert.
Unlike with Conan O’Brien Needs A Friend, though, where O’Brien interviews funny friends and celebrities in a way that is looser and more free-flowing than his TV chats (which were rarely not loose or free-flowing, to be fair), The Late Show Pod Show With Stephen Colbert will be a lot more like the actual TV version of The Late Show.
In fact, Deadline says it will be “an audio lift of the linear late-night series,” which means… it will just be the TV version of Stephen Colbert’s The Late Show, but with the whole visual component significantly stripped down—not completely removed, because there will probably be podcast art with Colbert’s face on it, but the face won’t move around when he talks like on TV.
The first episode of The Late Show Pod Show With Stephen Colbert will be available from Spotify’s Megaphone on October 25. New episodes will then come out every day, presumably following a similar narrative arc (so to speak) of the TV version of the show. You can see a trailer explaining the basic concept of the podcast (courtesy of Colbert himself) below: