I started working on The Colbert Report as a writers’ researcher in 2005. A couple months earlier, my mom had called: “Beck, I heard Stephen Colbert on Fresh Air today. He’s getting his own show. You should work for him.”
My life split cleanly in two. Back at work a couple weeks later, I found myself trying to flatten my grief, absorb it and keep going. Not because anyone said to do so (many colleagues showed up to the funeral in an oversized white rental van). Because the culture around me didn’t have adequate language for how to grieve, or where to make space for loss.
Take the viral interview with actor Andrew Garfield in 2021, who spoke plainly about missing his mother and wanting the grief to remain, because he regards it as all the unexpressed love he still has for her. Or one of Colbert’s many conversations with Anderson Cooper, reflecting on the deaths of Cooper’s parents with a clarity that didn’t rush toward closure. In 2019, Keanu Reeves responded simply to Colbert’s question in about what he believes happens when we die: that the people who love us will likely miss us very much. Colbert himself often returned to the loss of his father and brothers in a plane crash when he was a child, and his mother’s death. In 2024, Colbert payed tribute to his longtime assistant Amy Cole, a woman dear to many of us.
For all our talk about authenticity, television still struggles to hold difficult human experience unless it can be shaped into something digestible. Too often, grief is compressed into an origin story, lesson, or turning point. Or it’s reserved for moments of collective catastrophe. Everywhere else, it’s treated like something that needs to be edited down.
Loss didn’t have to be hidden to be survivable. Talking about it didn't diminish you. It deepened your understanding of others. And if you did it with the right beats and warmth, you wouldn’t send people running for the hills. You'd get an Emmy.
We are living in a moment of increasingly fragmented media, where fewer spaces bring large audiences into the same conversation. Late night television remains one of them. Colbert used his platform not just to comment on politics or culture, but to expand what could be said there.
In his decades of late night television, Colbert showed that love and loss are inseparable. As he steps away, television producers face a choice: Do we create space for the hard and the painful? Or do we push those conversations back to the margins, even while they shape every one of our lives?
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