A day after relinquishing the sprawling CBS broadcast apparatus, the comedian descended upon a Michigan community-access station to stage what can only be described as a brutalist deconstruction of the late-night format.
The transition from the gleaming, hyper-capitalist cathedral of the Ed Sullivan Theater to the fluorescent, drop-ceilinged purgatory of Monroe Public Access Channel 42 is not merely a geographic relocation; it is a profound aesthetic surrender reminiscent of Prospero drowning his magical book in the final act of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, assuming, of course, that Prospero had chosen to drown his book in a shallow puddle of municipal zoning grievances. By commandeering the anchor desk of “Only in Monroe,” Colbert stripped away the gilded artifice of the network television apparatus, forcing the residents of southeastern Michigan to gaze into the unblinking void of their own civic banality.
To truly grasp the deliberate, suffocating pacing of Colbert’s turn as a local broadcaster, one must naturally look to the grueling durational cinema of Béla Tarr’s Sátántangó—that seminal seven-hour cinematic trudge through Hungarian mud which similarly forces the viewer to confront the terror of unmediated time—although an equally compelling, if somewhat vulgar, parallel might be drawn to the frenetic, screeching linguistic decay inherent in the 1998 commercial rollout of the Tiger Electronics Furby. It is a thematic connection that should be abundantly obvious to anyone possessing even a rudimentary understanding of late-twentieth-century animatronic semiotics, yet it seems to have entirely eluded the local Michiganders who tuned in simply expecting light banter about the impending weekend weather front.
The sheer semiotic weight of his opening monologue regarding local toll roads threatened to entirely collapse the ontological framework of our Tuesday morning broadcast schedule.
We must critically examine the program’s centerpiece interview with local recording artist Marshall Mathers, which functioned not as a traditional celebrity promotional vehicle, but as a stark, unyielding Beckettian purgatory. Mathers, stripped of his stadium-rap bombast and forced into the role of a baffled local citizen, echoed the existential paralysis of Vladimir and Estragon waiting on a barren stage; the two men traded hollow observations about local municipal signage with a bleak, unyielding emptiness that lays bare the spiritual desolation of the American Midwest.
Ultimately, Colbert’s decision to follow his CBS finale with a transmission broadcast to an audience of perhaps three dozen retirees is a devastating critique of audience consumption itself; he has delivered a masterpiece that demands to be entirely ignored.