And so it came to pass Tuesday night, after nine months of gestation and preparation, of podcasts and promos, that Stephen Colbert, late of "The Colbert Report," became (only) the second host of CBS' "Late Show," created for David Letterman in 1993. And it was good, it was very, very good. 
 
 There were a few small glitches and creaks, I will admit in the name of critical scrupulousness and credibility, but you don't leave a great party complaining about a crack in the bowl the potato chips were in. It started strong, ended strong, and in between it was mostly ... strong. 
 
 In moving from a basic-cable comedy network to the top spot in the late-night lineup of a major broadcast network, Colbert is not just trading desks or getting a bigger room. Where prime-time TV series come and go, at times so quickly you can feel the breeze, big-time late night shows change hosts once a generation, if that. It is not so much a hiring as an investiture. 
 
 After an opening filmed piece, a supercut of "The Star-Spangled Banner" that featured the host singing with citizens on a baseball diamond, a bowling alley, in factory and field -- without irony, but partially to get to Jon Stewart's "Play ball!" -- he bounded onstage. (He is a good bounder, as "Colbert Report" fans know.) He twirled, shared some high kicks with bandleader Jon Batiste of the New Orleans Batistes, as an audience that could not have been more in his corner chanted his name. 
 
 And at last, as will be the case going forward, he was able to take it all in unfiltered, to accept the love without the pretense of it feeding his self-love. There were echoes of "The Colbert Report" -- "Hello, nation," he said in opening (adding, "I don't know what that means"). A bit on Donald Trump could have played without change on his former show. There was a tribute to David Letterman, the "high pencil mark on the door frame we all have to measure ourselves against." 
 
 A look at the guests and fans who stopped by Stephen Colbert's debut on "The Late Show." 
 
 The choice of Colbert to follow Letterman always felt sensible. He's an Emmy winner, a Time magazine cover boy, and, seemingly, everything else that has a cover. And he shares many of Letterman's best qualities: curiosity, intelligence, seriousness, a sense of the absurd, a speedy mind, a nose for phoniness. 
 
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 He is unlike Letterman, too, in ways that suggest new possibilities -- younger, though at 51 still the oldest host in late night; less acerbic; less haunted. He seems too smart and sensitive never to have had a dark night of the soul, but self-loathing does not seem to be one of his challenges. 
 
 Jeb Bush and George Clooney were his first guests, a yin-yang booking that seemed to say, "Whatever you might have expected from all those years of liberal-skewing, conservative-skewering satirical faux punditry, the new Colbert would not bow down to your expectations." The real key to his intentions seemed to be in the night's closing number, in which bandleader Batiste was joined by (among others) Colbert, Mavis Staples, Buddy Guy, the Alabama Shakes' Brittany Howard and Ben Folds, in a performance of Sly Stone's "Everyday People." 
 
 "We've got to live together," everybody sang. Colbert has acknowledged that he's another white man in a late-night field dominated by them -- a fact that his singing with Staples made quite clear. But he is not making it all about himself. 
 
 That didn't keep him from asking Bush some straight questions about policy; and if he didn't press him as hard as Letterman might have, he didn't just let him go. "I'm going to say something that's heretic I guess," said Bush. "I don't think Barack Obama has bad motives," only bad ideas. 
 
 "Oh, you were so close to getting me to clap," said Colbert, who in the "spirit of civility" admitted to Bush, "There is a non-zero chance that I would vote for you." 
 
 They joked a little about the pictures of presidents that sometimes grace schoolrooms. "It's a little Stalinist, isn't it?" said Colbert, reminding us that he is a different cat in network late night. 
 
 The Clooney interview that preceded it took a second to get on its feet, wobbling between seriousness and shtick. At last it relaxed into a bit in which Clooney's lack of a product to promote let them invent one, a film called "Decision Strike." There were clips. 
 
 Will it be a hit? 
 
 It's a question that will be asked, and unanswered; but seems for the moment beside the point. There will be none of that Leno-Conan business. CBS is a patient, not a panicky, network. Their turnover is slow. 
 
 Network president and CEO Les Moonves, who hired him as "the only logical successor to Dave" -- and was in the audience Tuesday night as part of a joke about switching the show back to reruns of "The Mentalist" -- has himself been there for 20 years; at 65, he can take the long view. 
 
 But even from Tuesday, the view looks good. 
 
 "It is not easier necessarily to approach something with energy and vitality than with dread and morbidity," Colbert said in one of the podcasts posted in the run-up to the premiere. "It is only better." 
 
 Twitter: @LATimesTVLloyd 
 
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 'The Late Show' recap: Stephen Colbert dishes on Oreos, hummus and 'Everyday People' 
 
 Did the debut of 'The Late Show with Stephen Colbert' leave you feeling 'weird,' 'nice' or 'craving Oreos'? ||||| Stephen Colbert is no David Letterman. 
 
 Sure, Colbert can do irony; he can mercilessly mock those deserving of mockery, and satirize the powers that be; and he can aim a sharp barb at a politician or a movie star or a network president; and he is more than happy to make a fool of himself. 
 
 But, at least during Tuesday night’s much-hyped debut of the Letterman show’s successor on CBS, The Late Show With Stephen Colbert, there was nary a sour whiff of the world-weary psychic struggle, the undercurrent of self-flagellating insecurity, or the deep suspicion of human motives that fueled Letterman’s comic genius and also stoked, especially in the latter years of his more than three-decade career as a talk show host (including 22 years on CBS), his legendary discontent. 
 
 Instead, Colbert is a joyful jester—not a standup comic, but an all-singing, all-dancing performer with a sweetly magnetic smile. 
 
 Although he tried out a few setups and punchlines, he is not, at bottom, a joke-teller. Indeed, he seems to have minimal interest in performing a monologue night after night, and managed to get through his first show quite happily without one. 
 
 For his debut as the star of CBS’s 11:35 p.m. franchise, Colbert literally twirled onto the stage, high-kicking with his Louisiana-born bandleader, Jon Batiste, as the audience leapt to its feet and chanted “Stephen! Stephen!”—a holdover tradition from the Comedy Central program in which Colbert, for nine years, adopted the persona of a know-nothing right-wing blowhard. 
 
 “I used to play a narcissistic conservative pundit—now I’m just narcissistic,” Colbert joked to Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, who, following George Clooney as the second guest on the premiere, expressed surprise that there were so many images of Colbert’s face adorning the freshly redecorated Ed Sullivan Theater—which now features a vertiginous dome that is the showbiz answer to the Sistine Chapel. 
 
 Note to Donald Trump: Jeb was decidedly high-energy during his appearance, a quality that might have been overlooked amid the atom-splitting energy that Colbert brought to the new gig. 
 
 Colbert, who as everyone knows is politically savvy—he once launched his own presidential campaign PAC, and his sister Elizabeth ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Democrat against disgraced former South Carolina governor Mark Sanford—even prompted George W. Bush’s younger brother to make some news. 
 
 Colbert asked Jeb how he’d differentiate himself from the 43rd president. 
 
 “I think my brother didn’t control the Republican Congress’s spending,” Jeb said, noting that when he himself was governor of Florida, he was such a fiscal conservative that his treasured nickname was Veto Corleone. “He should have brought the hammer down... Our brand is limited government. He didn’t veto things. He didn’t bring order and fiscal restraint.” 
 
 One can only imagine the tense fraternal encounter that will result from that particular revelation. 
 
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 With his first-ever guest, Clooney—who, as usual, was far too charming, amusing, and affable for his own good, the perfect extra man at a black-tie dinner party—Colbert explored the superficiality of celebrity. 
 
 “We don’t know each other,” Colbert told Clooney, after noting that he wasn’t invited to Clooney’s wedding last year to international human-rights lawyer Amal Alamuddin. “I don’t know you, but I wanted to give you something,” he added—handing over a robin’s egg blue Tiffany box. 
 
 When the goateed, mustachioed Clooney opened the wedding gift, it turned out to be a silver paperweight engraved with the words, “I don’t know you.” 
 
 “You can pass that on to another celebrity that you don’t know,” Colbert suggested. 
 
 On his Comedy Central show, even in character, Colbert displayed mad skills as an interviewer, actually listening and reacting to what his guests had to say—occasionally exposing the fallacy of their arguments—and that talent will doubtless serve him well in his current occupation. 
 
 There were, of course, several prepared comedy bits on the inaugural program—some more successful than others. A recurring set piece involving former B-movie actor and current CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves, sitting in the front row with a contraption that supposedly allowed him to interrupt the Colbert show with clips from The Mentalist, was kinda funny the first time and kinda stale the second time and lethally leaden the third time. 
 
 Another shtick, in which a sinister-voiced satanic presence demanded that Colbert keep doing ads for a particular brand of hummus, was just plain weird. 
 
 More winning, at least for this viewer, was a bit in which Colbert illustrated the media’s unreasoning obsession with Trump by gorging on Oreo cookies (which candidate Trump had declared he’d never eat again after the brand moved its factory to Mexico). That, at least, presented the host with an opportunity to display his knack for physical comedy—messily downing the cream-filled cookies until he emptied a whole package of them onto his electric blue suit. 
 
 The premiere opened with Colbert in various venues—a Little League game, bowling alley, a factory, etc.—crooning The Star-Spangled Banner, and in a manner that was far more celebratory than ironic; the real Colbert is a bit of a patriot and also a bit of a softie. 
 
 Also in the mix was a cameo appearance on screen by Colbert’s NBC competitor, Jimmy Fallon, who wished him: “Have a great show, buddy”—a public sentiment that would have been unthinkable during Letterman’s bitter rivalry with his arch-nemesis, Tonight Show host Jay Leno, who, Letterman’s supporters long believed, stole his rightful crown as Johnny Carson’s heir apparent. 
 
 “I bow to no man in my fandom of David Letterman,” Colbert told his audience in a fitting and heartfelt homage to his predecessor. Letterman, he added, left a high mark “on the door frame that we all have to measure ourselves against.” 
 
 It’s early days, of course, but I won’t be surprised if Colbert, who seems well suited to the task, ultimately leaves his mark on high. ||||| There was a time when I thought noting up front that you can’t "review" — nor should you — the first night of anyone’s talk show was being too obvious. I mean, these things are beasts of a different kind, and they will most likely be entirely different in a few months or a few weeks even, and then something completely different from that in six months and definitely in a year. 
 
 So many current shows are evident of exactly that. 
 
 But early Twitter reaction to Stephen Colbert's first night as host of The Late Show on CBS, which ran from loyalist praise to mixed worriedness down to "this is terrible," proved to me that it’s an absolute necessity to remind people that this will be a quick take — a first impression — and not a review. 
 
 And that’s all it will be — you can’t judge what might end up being a 10-year run or more by the first night. That’s both stupid and amateur hour. In Colbert’s case, this debut was just a little more than an hour of what might or might not be duplicated tomorrow. In many ways, that’s the beauty of late night shows — they evolve with ferocious consistency. 
 
 As for his first impression, the thing that shot through with clarity is that Colbert is very likely not what you think he will be — he’s as ambitiously creative as anyone and not afraid to see if something will kill or die quietly. Meaning, if you thought Colbert would take over for David Letterman (whom he honored with great praise) and turn into Jay Leno, you were way off the mark. And maybe more important, if you thought Colbert was going to be 180 degrees different from what he was on The Colbert Report, that too is a mistaken assumption. So much of himself was in that caricature that anyone who couldn’t figure that out should have been watching someone different. 
 
 Not surprisingly, this first night seemed like an amalgamation of every piece of Colbert — from pre-Daily Show TV stuff all the way through post-Colbert Report weirdness that he exhibited online while touting his new CBS series over the summer. There were some nerves — how could there not be? — and there were plenty of flashes of the wickedly smart and super-fast comedic intellect he’s honed over the years. Did it all work? Of course not. But what I liked most was the feeling that Colbert was going to reveal a side of himself that he didn’t get to show much on the Colbert Report or even The Daily Show — a side that was much more reflective of his days on Strangers With Candy or even The Dana Carvey Show. 
 
 This guy has a lot of range, and he came out on this first night not afraid to essentially say, "Hey America, I’m a little weirder than you might have heard." Hell, he didn’t even have his first guest on — George Clooney — until 30 minutes in. 
 
 That is, his flair for the dramatic and the funny and the fearless was readily evident in that first night, sometimes spilling into bits (the taped opening with the National Anthem or the Sabra product placement thing) that either didn’t achieve lift-off or just outright crashed. But that’s what you want to see with Colbert — you want to see him unshackled from the faux character he played on the Report and the faux reporter he played on The Daily Show. You want him, over the course of every night of the week and all the weeks in a month, to unfold into something at once familiar but also startlingly fresh. 
 
 And he’s got the chops and the acting/comedy history to infuse the show with that x-factor that might have been unexpected. It will be thrilling to see it get honed, though I imagine that some of the early negative tweeting from fans had a lot to do with them seeing that heretofore largely untapped part of his personality. I think what will serve the show in its longevity will be that weird, creative zing that he brings to the show — though for some, that might not be their favorite surprise element to his personality. 
 
 But at least he didn’t hide it until the second month. 
 
 Beyond some amped-up nerves, Colbert did a couple of things that were interesting and bear monitoring for the future: He wasn’t afraid to have a politician on the first night (Jeb Bush), which by all rights was the kind of divisive idea that maybe CBS flinched at (as anyone probably should have) — but it ended up being a strong part of the first show, despite the readily evident edits that had to be made. It was probably a win for Bush to go on there knowing it could have gone sideways in a real hurry. And for Colbert, who riffed on Donald Trump to mixed effect prior to Bush’s arrival on set (drowning himself in Oreos was the best part), having a political candidate on your first show when this country is so incredibly divided was daring (and again, a good sign that he wasn’t going to be tame). Both men acquitted themselves well there, as opposed to Clooney basically saving Colbert’s ass during the first awkward interview he did (it’s hard to go wrong with a Clooney or a Tom Hanks, for example; they’ve saved a lot of hosts from jittery missteps). 
 
 The second element that was interesting was not that he gave his wonderful band leader Jon Batiste (and the Stay Human band) plenty of love and space to play around — including a closing star-studded and eclectic jam that featured Mavis Staples, Alabama Shakes leader Brittany Howard and others — but that he joined in and sang as well. 
 
 Now, you could say this was maybe too much Colbert. After all, he’s got his picture everywhere in the theater (something that Bush riffed on successfully), and Colbert already does his own announcing and introductions, but the very act of getting out there and singing and dancing didn’t seem like ego overkill to me; it seemed like a statement that Colbert was going to have fun regardless of what anyone thought. And that’s the absolute best element to any late night talk show — a fearless, eff-it, let’s have fun approach. 
 
 Because as this very first show indicates — with its insta-pundit reactions and immediately vociferous Twitter takes — there is no lack of judgment out there, and you can't please all the people so you might as well please yourself and make the kind of show that best represents your whole personality, whether people embrace it immediately or not. 
 
 I liked the set, the desk, the knowing crowd and mostly Batiste. But you can bet that there will be so much that’s different in the coming weeks — the implementation of skits, recurring bits, special elements that Colbert feels comfortable with (or uncomfortable, as the case may be). Change will come because it always comes, no matter what you think of the first night. Hell, I’d vote right now to immediately change the unfortunate and dubious Twitter hashtag — #LSSC — to the far better and simpler #LateShow. Can that happen? 
 
 Beyond minor first-night quibbles, I have little doubt that Colbert will be absolutely essential viewing on a nightly basis and his show will be a success no matter what way he eventually settles in the chair. The key for him is to make it original, not imitative of what we’ve seen from the past or too safe and comfy — and I think he’s only just beginning on that original route. 
 
 Email: Tim.Goodman@THR.com 
 
 Twitter: @BastardMachine 
 
 5:56 a.m. An earlier version of this story incorrectly listed John Legend as one of the musicians who performed at the end of the show. ||||| The amped-up, expansive premiere of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” was not so tightly focused. Befitting the difference between a niche cable half-hour and a network variety hour, it was not a rigidly composed plate but a groaning board, built less around a concept than around a vibe of smart fun and an urge to show off its host’s many skills. 
 
 Meet Our New Critic James Poniewozik (pawn-uh-WHA-zik) is the new chief television critic for The New York Times. For the past 16 years, he was the television critic for Time, where among other accomplishments, he started the Time.com Tuned In blog, for which he wrote thousands of posts, from quick takes to wide-ranging cultural and personal essays. He comes from Monroe, Mich., and is currently binge-watching "Lost" with his family. Follow him on Twitter: @poniewozik 
 
 Singing, for one. The hour opened with Mr. Colbert traveling cross-country to harmonize with assorted viewers on “The Star-Spangled Banner” (the patriotism of his “Report” character, it turns out, was no act), a bit capped off with his old pal Jon Stewart dressed as an umpire. It ended with him joining the house band, Jon Batiste and Stay Human, to belt Sly and the Family Stone’s “Everyday People” alongside Mavis Staples and a slew of guest stars. 
 
 Those numbers gave the show a populist spirit. Mr. Colbert was hosting a party, but a more joyously nerdy wingding than Jimmy Fallon’s celebrity hangout on NBC and Jimmy Kimmel’s viral prank extravaganza on ABC. The opening titles, which rendered New York City as a living toy landscape, suggest a Wes Andersonian spirit of meticulously curated, experimental-yet-preservationist play. 
 
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 Mr. Colbert was, by and large, “himself” his first night, whatever that means for a professional host: There were no characters, new or old. But there were echoes of “The Colbert Report” — or screams of it, really, in the audience members who burst into “Stephen! Stephen! Stephen!” just as on so many nights past on Comedy Central. (Just once, Mr. Colbert indulged them with a booming “Nation,” like Springsteen dusting off “Born to Run.”) 
 
 And there was a “Report”-like sensibility to two of the hour’s strangest and funniest bits. In the first, he struck a bargain with a demonic amulet, which required him to endorse Sabra-brand hummus. Next, he sandwiched the requisite torrent of Donald Trump jokes in an analogy that likened coverage of Mr. Trump to Oreos: junk food the smartest media guy couldn’t resist. He proved the point by emptying a package of cookies over his face. 
 
 Of course, those surreal pieces were also showcases, sponsored or not, for two actual brands. Network talk shows sell things — movies, campaigns — and as their profit margins get smaller, they have to sell harder than ever. (Mr. Colbert has made fun of this before, running a 2008 favorite-son primary campaign in South Carolina sponsored by Doritos.) 
 
 The sketches may have been ways of having a chickpea-and-cream-filling feast and eating it, too. But they also suggested that Mr. Colbert could be as sharp and acerbic about the conventions of late night as he had been about cable news punditry. 
 
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 Other times, “The Late Show” was unironically a talk show, and the first celebrity interview, with George Clooney — not an especially interesting one — included the kind of movie-clip sketch that gets tossed onto off nights of lesser late-night shows. 
 
 But with Jeb Bush, the Republican presidential candidate, the host showed he had both fastballs and changeups in his repertoire. Mr. Colbert invoked his own brother Jay, seated in the audience, with whom he disagrees politically, as a gambit to ask Mr. Bush how he could love his own brother, the former President George W. Bush, yet differ from him on policy. (Mr. Bush said he’d be more fiscally conservative, but only after Mr. Colbert refused to let him wiggle out with a joke answer.) 
 
 The taping of the episode ran two hours, and the edits to get it down to size were conspicuous. Mr. Colbert and crew want to restore the idea of bigness to late night — down to the set, which restored the Ed Sullivan Theater dome — but they’ll need to work on fitting their production into its package. 
 
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 But as overstuffed and messy as this new “Late Show” could be, big is a refreshing goal at a time when late-night shows have been redefined as content creators for your phone. It is maybe the biggest slight and highest compliment to say that none of the episode’s best bits seemed especially viral. 
 
 The field is more crowded than it used to be, but there’s a window for Mr. Colbert to stand out as a nimble, seriously funny comic whose guests say interesting things rather than do funny things. He and his competitors have rejected the proud tradition of late-night hosts hating one another with the fire of a thousand hells — Mr. Fallon made a cameo, as Mr. Colbert did on “Tonight” — but that doesn’t mean you and I can’t notice differences, and let’s just say I don’t expect to hear, as I did during Mr. Bush’s interview, the phrase “emotional narrative” on Fallon anytime soon. 
 
 The overabundance of the first “Late Show With Stephen Colbert” may be a flaw then, but it’s also the best reason to be excited for the second, and the next hundred. This show may not completely know what it is yet, but it knows exactly who its host is: a smart, curious, playful entertainer who’s delighted to be there. 
 
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 Mr. Colbert was one character for a decade; now, he could be several people any given night. Having the vastest dome to play under, the most cookies to gobble, may be the only way for Stephen Colbert to someday outdo himself.
– Stephen Colbert's long-awaited takeover of The Late Show took place last night, and the critics are weighing in. The overall consensus: He may not be David Letterman's clone, but that's probably not what we want anyway. The consensus is Colbert looks to be a solid addition to the late-night lineup. Some of the reviews: "It was good, it was very, very good," was the assessment of Robert Lloyd, who concedes for the Los Angeles Times that there were a "few small glitches and creaks," but that "you don't leave a great party complaining about a crack in the bowl the potato chips were in." He adds while Colbert shares certain traits with Letterman—"curiosity, intelligence, seriousness, a sense of the absurd, a speedy mind, a nose for phoniness"—he's also "less acerbic" and "less haunted." Lloyd Grove also points out discrepancies between Colbert ("the joyful jester") and Letterman ("the great cynic") for the Daily Beast, noting there "was nary a sour whiff of the world-weary psychic struggle, the undercurrent of self-flagellating insecurity, or the deep suspicion of human motives that fueled Letterman's comic genius." Instead, Colbert offered himself up as an "all-singing, all-dancing performer with a sweetly magnetic smile" and a knack for sending up the media (Donald Trump obsession was last night's target). What Grove didn't care for: some of the prepared skits he says fell flat. James Poniewozik writes for the New York Times that the show was built "around a vibe of smart fun and an urge to show off its host's many skills," including his interviewing acumen. "The host showed he had both fastballs and changeups in his repertoire," Poniewozik says of Colbert's back-and-forth with Jeb Bush, in which Colbert "refused to let [Bush] wiggle out with a joke answer" as to how he differs politically from brother George W. It would be both "stupid" and "amateur" to give Colbert a full-fledged review based on one show, Tim Goodman writes for the Hollywood Reporter, so he gives a "first impression." "This first night seemed like an amalgamation of every piece of Colbert" and "there were some nerves"—but "how could there not be?" he writes. "There were plenty of flashes of the wickedly smart and super-fast comedic intellect he's honed over the years. Did it all work? Of course not. But what I liked most was the feeling that Colbert was going to reveal a side of himself that he didn't get to show much on The Colbert Report or even The Daily Show." Check out Colbert looking back on Trump's best campaign moments yet.