Stephen Colbert Hits a High Note

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Guest Essay

By Lisa Schwarzbaum

Ms. Schwarzbaum is a former film critic for Entertainment Weekly.

When “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” won the Emmy for outstanding talk series in September, the host gave thanks with a short mission statement. When he first conceived his iteration of the CBS franchise, which he took over from David Letterman, Mr. Colbert had in mind a late-night comedy show “that was about love,” he explained.

“At a certain point,” he went on, “and you can guess what that point was, I realized that, in some ways, we were doing a late-night comedy show about loss. And that’s related to love, because sometimes you can only truly........

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