A cameraman circles around him, and Mr. Colbert looks directly into the lenses and says, “Hey.” Mr. Licht said Mr. Colbert had started doing<br />that on his own just about three months ago, a brief, intimate moment between the host and the viewer, watching at home, right before bed.<br />How an Election Surprise Helped Stephen Colbert Find His Elusive Groove -<br />Mr. Colbert has done what was unthinkable a year ago: turned “The Late Show” into the most viewed show in late night.<br />“On the old show, all of us handled all those responsibilities,” Mr. Colbert said, acknowledging that the CBS show was a much bigger undertaking.<br />Sensing the gravity of the moment, Chris Licht, the executive producer of “The Late Show<br />With Stephen Colbert,” walked over to Mr. Colbert’s desk during a musical performance.<br />“You cannot do two weeks of live shows and be a control freak.”<br />Mr. Colbert became much more forgiving of “a flub here or a flub there,” Mr. Licht said.<br />Mr. Colbert had done, by his estimation, about a dozen live shows over 10 years at “The Colbert Report.” Over the past nine months, he has done 15.<br />“Two weeks of that changed all of our approach to the show, and it also changed the trust I had to place in my staff,” Mr. Colbert said.<br />When Mr. Moonves approached him about Mr. Colbert, Mr. Licht said he didn’t watch the show; he quickly burned through several episodes.<br />What followed was what Mr. Licht described in a recent interview as the turning point for Mr. Colbert, who had struggled to gain his footing on CBS after shedding the pompous-pundit character<br />that made him famous on Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report.”<br />“I think it’s when he became himself,” he said.
