Before Stephen Colbert ever took over David Letterman’s desk, he tried out the job somewhere a little less intimidating: Monroe, Michigan.
At midnight on July 1, 2015, viewers of Only in Monroe, a public access show produced by Monroe Public Access Cable Television, tuned in to find hosts Michelle Baumann and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko Wilson missing from the show’s low-budget set. In their place was a well-dressed stranger watering what appeared to be a fake plant.
“Oh, hello!” Stephen Colbert said as he greeted the camera. “Welcome to a new edition of Only in Monroe.”
At the time, Colbert was in late-night limbo. He had signed off from The Colbert Report the previous December, retiring the blowhard conservative-pundit character that had made him famous. But he was still two months away from succeeding Letterman as host of CBS’ Late Show.
Starting over, he later admitted, was not exactly relaxing.
“There’s all this pressure on a first show,” Colbert recalled during a 2024 Late Show audience Q&A. His then-head writer Opus Moreschi suggested a way to relieve some of that pressure: “Let’s do a first show someplace else, like at a local cable access studio somewhere out in America.”
Somewhere out in America turned out to be Monroe, population roughly 20,000.
Colbert’s takeover was kept quiet among insiders at MPACT, though even those in the know were surprised when the fill-in host showed up with a musical guest: Michigan native Eminem.
Eminem’s appearance “just sort of happened,” MPACT program director Lance Sottile told The New York Times. “We were like, ‘Oh—oh my gosh.’”
The resulting episode is a strange little time capsule: part viral stunt, part late-night pilot, part identity crisis with community announcements.
Colbert opened with jokes about local points of interest, noting of the city’s location on Brest Bay, “there’s nothing locals love more than heading out on the lake and motorboating the Brest.” With no studio audience, the punchlines landed in dead silence, which somehow made them funnier.
Viewed now, the episode plays like a bridge between Colbert’s old mask and his next one. He was no longer playing “Stephen Colbert,” the Comedy Central pundit. But he also had not fully settled into the CBS host he would become. On Only in Monroe, he was still performing a man whose confidence slightly exceeded his grasp of reality.
That was especially clear in his interview with Eminem, whom Colbert introduced as “Marshall Mathers, a local Michigander who is making a name for himself in the competitive world of music.”
The joke, of course, was that Colbert appeared to have no idea he was sitting across from one of the most famous rappers alive. Instead, he assumed Mathers’ musical influences must include Bob Seger, Ted Nugent, and Motown.
Eminem, Colbert later said, had not been warned about the bit.
“He did not know what he was in for,” Colbert recalled. Still, the rapper “rolled with it really well,” gamely playing along.
Colbert also interviewed the show’s actual hosts, Baumann and Rafko Wilson, the Monroe native who was crowned Miss America in 1988. “I think of you guys as the Kathie Lee and Hoda of Monroe,” Colbert told them.
But the part of Only in Monroe that ultimately proved most durable came at the end, when Colbert and Eminem delivered a community calendar together, hyping an infant CPR safety class, the River Raisin Independence Festival and Fireworks, and a meeting of the Monroe Coin Club.
At the time, it was a perfectly absurd capper to a one-off bit. Then Colbert brought it with him to CBS.
“Community Calendar” became a recurring segment on The Late Show, with Colbert and a guest spotlighting real events from the guest’s hometown while seated on a recreation of the Only in Monroe set inside the Ed Sullivan Theater.
Jeff Daniels did Chelsea, Michigan. Nick Offerman did Minooka, Illinois. John Oliver did Bedford, Bedfordshire. Aubrey Plaza did Wilmington, Delaware. During the pandemic, John Mulaney represented “The Internet.” The bit resurfaced as recently as January of this year, with Amanda Seyfried helping Colbert celebrate the civic wonders of Allentown, Pennsylvania.
So while Only in Monroe began as a way for Colbert to burn off some pre-Late Show nerves, it also produced one of his CBS show’s most charming and enduring bits: national television briefly pretending to care, very deeply, about pancake breakfasts, coin clubs, local festivals, and whatever else was happening that month in a guest’s hometown.
Colbert wanted the Monroe stunt to go viral immediately. After the show aired, he checked his phone and found nothing.
“We wanted a real virality,” he said. “We wanted to do something kind of special and stupid that would just blow up.”
The delay turned out to be very public-access. MPACT had first dibs.
“Our policy states that a program that’s produced here at MPACT has to be aired on our channel before it can be distributed in other means,” Sottile explained to the Times the following day. “So they had to air it last night before we could share it with the world on YouTube.”
Twenty-four hours later, the video had millions of views.
At the time, Only in Monroe looked like a clever pre-Late Show promotional stunt—Colbert’s fake first show before his real first show. A decade later, with his CBS run nearing its end, it looks more revealing than that: a strange, funny rehearsal for the job ahead, staged as far from Broadway and 53rd Street as he could get.
And should Colbert find himself missing TV after The Late Show signs off, there may still be a seat available in Monroe. After some time away, Baumann and Rafko Wilson recently brought Only in Monroe back.
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