Stephen Colbert Marks 10 Years on The Late Show: Revisiting His 2015 Premiere

Ten years ago today—on September 8, 2015—The Late Show with Stephen Colbert premiered on CBS, inheriting the weight of David Letterman’s legacy and the high-wire expectations of a late-night shakeup.

At the time, Colbert was best known for playing a character; by the end of the decade, he would be the defining voice of the real late-night landscape. Revisiting that first episode now offers a fascinating snapshot of both the uncertainty and the ambition that set the stage for what became a seismic shift in the 11:30 hour.

Colbert’s first outing found him still working out what The Late Show should be—what tone to strike between the satirical persona of The Colbert Report and the real man behind that character.

He admitted as much to viewers early on: “With this show, I begin the search for the real Stephen Colbert,” he told the crowd during his monologue. The punchline—“I just hope I don’t find him on Ashley Madison”—may feel dated today, but the setup was no mere gag.

Looking back now, the premiere feels less unfamiliar than expected.

From the very beginning, the show sought to shake up the standard late-night format. Instead of opening with a title sequence, The Late Show launched cold—these days with pre-produced comedy, but back in 2015 with Colbert’s entrance and monologue.

The premiere was prefaced by a pre-tape of Colbert singing the National Anthem around New York City, capped with a cameo that drew the first big cheer of the night. After finishing on a Little League field, the umpire removed his mask to reveal Colbert’s mentor and executive producer Jon Stewart. “Play ball!” Stewart declared to kick things off.

Just as he would a decade later when announcing his show’s cancellation, Colbert carved out time in his monologue to thank his new home network, CBS. With then-CEO Les Moonves in attendance, Colbert joked about CBS keeping his time slot “warm” with reruns of The Mentalist. Onstage, Moonves sat in front of a giant lever toggling between “Late Show” and “Mentalist,” demonstrating more than once that he could cut Colbert off at will.

Another star Colbert reintroduced on night one was the Ed Sullivan Theater itself. The venue had undergone extensive renovations, including restoration of its original dome ceiling—long hidden behind Late Show with David Letterman’s lighting rig. With updated technology, the dome once again dominated the stage, enhanced by elaborate digital projections.

“I wanted to have Michelangelo paint it, but it turns out that ninja turtles aren’t real,” Colbert quipped.

Knowing that David Letterman loomed large in viewers’ minds, Colbert moved quickly to acknowledge his predecessor.

“As hard as we have worked to make it to this day, there is no way I would be here right now if not for the man who graced this stage for 22 years,” Colbert said from behind his new desk.

“I’m talking, of course, about Biff Henderson,” he added, a nod sure to delight Letterman loyalists, before sincerely thanking Letterman and calling himself a “first-generation Letterman fan.”

“The comedy landscape is so thickly planted with the forest of Dave’s ideas that we sometimes need to remind ourselves just how tall he stands. So just for the record, I am not replacing David Letterman,” Colbert assured. “His creative legacy is a high pencil mark on a doorframe that we all have to measure ourselves against. But we will try to honor his achievement by doing the best show we can, and occasionally making the network very mad at us.”

Colbert didn’t save his collegial spirit just for Letterman. He also reached out to Jimmy Fallon, tuning in to The Tonight Show mid-monologue via the video wall. Fallon greeted Colbert directly and even promoted his own guest lineup before signing off with: “See you in the locker room.”

Even in 2015, sponsorships were baked into the format. Colbert leaned into the reality with his trademark mix of satire and self-awareness, turning an ad placement into an extended bit. In a pre-taped sketch, Colbert sold his soul to an Assyrian fire god in exchange for the hosting job, only to be cursed with product plugs—on premiere night, Sabra Roasted Red Pepper Hummus. It was prescient: as ratings shrank across late night, elaborate branded segments became the norm.

More prescient still was Colbert’s riff on Donald Trump. Then only a presidential candidate, Trump had already become unavoidable fodder. Colbert staged a meta sketch comparing Trump jokes to Oreo cookies: irresistible, even as he insisted he didn’t need them to succeed. It proved to be one of the show’s defining threads over the next decade.

The energy carried into the night’s interviews. With no project to promote, George Clooney gamely played along in a fictional promo campaign for a made-up movie, Decision Strike, complete with clips. At one point, Colbert broke the fourth wall of talk-show etiquette to gift Clooney a Tiffany paperweight engraved with “I don’t know you.”

His second guest, Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush, brought the conversation back to politics. Colbert alternated between earnest questions and comedy bits, at one point forcing Bush to read absurd scripted lines as mock debate prep. The interview produced both laughs and candid exchanges, including Bush’s near-applause line about Barack Obama’s motives, which Colbert hilariously undercut in real time.

The exchange also showed Colbert’s skill for depth. He invoked his brother Jay, in the audience that night, as an example of familial love across political divides, and pressed Bush on how his own politics diverged from those of his brother George. Colbert even introduced his wife Evie McGee-Colbert and children, who would later become part of the show’s fabric.

The night closed with a celebratory performance of Sly & the Family Stone’s “Everyday People,” with bandleader Jon Batiste, Stay Human, and a lineup of all-star guests including Mavis Staples, Buddy Guy, Ben Folds, and Brittany Howard. Colbert even took the mic for a verse as audience photos filled the theater’s screens.

Finally, he paid off his earlier Fallon gag with a post-credits sketch: the two hosts bumping into each other in the “late-night locker room,” lockers labeled for Seth Meyers, Jimmy Kimmel, Larry Wilmore, and Conan O’Brien. Before leaving, Colbert tapped a photo of Jon Stewart inside his own locker, a nod to the mentor who launched him into late-night’s main stage.

In May, CBS will, metaphorically speaking, switch back to reruns of The Mentalist. But today marks a milestone worth celebrating: ten years of comedy, stars, broadcast history, and a show that emerged from under the long shadow of Letterman and the Colbert Report persona. That premiere night in 2015 captured a host still searching for his footing, but it also planted the seeds of a voice that would, in time, not only define a tumultuous political era but also dethrone The Tonight Show’s decades-long stranglehold on late night.