Monroe Michigan's Public Access TV Taken Over by Stephen Colbert and Eminem

The secret Michigan public access show between the Colbert Report and The Late Show

UPDATE: I totally called it, Colbert dropped a new episode THIS MORNING. Read to the end to get the full context.

In the second episode of Strike Force Five — the podcast of Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, John Oliver, and Stephen Colbert — Colbert revealed that between Colbert Report and Late Show he didn’t want the pressure of a first show. His team suggested they take over a public access television show just to figure out what the voice was like between the character Colbert played in Report and the real Colbert trying to be himself for the first time in years.

Maybe you don’t have time to watch the whole thing (above), so here’s the thing: it was a public access TV show that literally had 12 viewers prior to his showing up and someone ratted them out. We’ll get to the rat in a second.

MPACT — Monroe Public Access Cable Television — were great to him apparently. “There’s no I in MPACT.”

The character’s fascinating. Both chronologically and in terms of its philokalic aesthetics, it stands between the awkward Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis and Joe Pera’s entire schtick.

He encourages people to go to MPACT’S YouTube to “binge watch 2014 city council meetings,” which led to awkward insider spoiler alerts about “free parking on Cass street: that did not end well.” Honestly, having seen this kind of minimum-access local television host — and having exposed them at their worst:

…I know this media market well.

Colbert nailed it. And I’m shocked I didn’t know this even existed. He starts going through local events. The simultaneous love and care he proffers Monroe, Michigan — as wide and deep as any Sufjan album — reminds me of my fellow pet project and friends of the site The Joplin Toad, for whom I often consulted and wrote for free. To give you an idea of the Joplin Toad’s market — which according to the Guinness Beer Book of World Records, drew a larger readership at one point than the Joplin Globe — Mark 9 (the Toad’s editor in chief and the photographer I often hire for free headshot day in NYC) once begged me to write a halloween piece.

I said no.

He tested asking again.

I said, “I already said no Mark, I’m busy.”

He said, “I know you said no, but don’t you want to?”

“Absolutely not, buddy, stop asking.”

Two weeks later he texts and said, “It’d really be nice if you had a horror story or a funny poem to fill this out.”

I texted back, “Marcus Noonschwoondoooglittler: if you ask me one more frigging time to write something for this issue in the midst of my deadlines after I’ve told you repeatedly — bff to bff — that I cannot possibly do it this month, I will literally text you a ballad about how in your last will and testament you asked me to drag your desiccated corpse to Disney world and I did it as favor to my best friend.”

He said, “Great, I need it by Friday.”

I rage texted it back to him in thirty minutes and that’s the version you read in The Last Will and Testament of Mark Neuenschwander. And also if you know my relationship with Mark, you know I’m never actually that mad at him and was trying to set a boundary I didn’t actually want to keep. I was mad because I knew what I actually wanted to do was write a ridiculous poem instead of being a grown up. And he, knowing me, knew if he nagged enough he’d get me to cave. It’s how things generally actually got done at the Toad because they were always trying to find ways to lovingly poke fun at Joplin, Missouri in loving competition as the dark younger sibling to the Joplin Globe.

Anyways, I have a deep abiding affection for this kind of market.

What’s most fascinating about this particularly show is how quick it is. There is no laugh track. There’s no live to tape. There’s no studio audience. So it’s actually funnier because he does it all straight. It might be the funniest thing I’ve seen from Colbert. Part of the reason is that for me, personally, hearing other people laugh triggers a hipster-adjacent¹ reaction in me and I’m less likely to laugh.

Having Colbert’s same graphics team deliver on these hilarious bits and then Stephen do it all straight as if he's really on the Monroe team is gold. In fact, I would probably watch a show that was just him hopping around public access TV for a year. I think it’s gold and I also think it would give us a glimpse into the communities of America we wouldn’t see otherwise. Steinbeck did just this with Travels with Charlie at the end of his career when he was Colbert’s age and it’s my favorite Steinbeck.

After hosting the normal hosts — in which they confess to turf wars with other small communities — Colbert first litigates a local Yelp Review beef between a man named Mark M. who was reviewing a 14-year-old experience he had in the 90’s that the owner of the restaurant logged on to rant back and forth with him over. Watching Colbert’s rehashing of the local drama both highlights the absurdity of these kinds of petty arguments, pokes fun at the guilty parties, at Yelp itself for hosting this kind of thing regularly, and — by fact checking it all — eventually at us for indulging in it by offering to pay Mark M. the $4.75 difference of the “price gouging” of the meal in a GIGANTIC check.

It’s not like he couldn’t have serious guests on. After commercial break Colbert brings on a Michigan local, Eminem. What follows is easily the most awkward interview ever. Clearly Eminem has no clue why this would be funny or something anyone would want to watch. It’s painfully hilarious watching Colbert see “how much of a Michigander you are” and tests him on how many Bob Seger songs he knows.

Well it starts out with songs where the hook is the title. And Eminem gets some of those wrong.

But it quickly turns into a back and forth where Colbert’s just reliving all of these classic singer songwriter hits and Eminem gets more and more pissed that he can’t even get a word in edge wise. He gets super defensive and it’s so, so delightful to watch.

That interview ends with Colbert giving Eminem the typical small town dressing down of the humanities. What’s Eminem’s fall back? It’s nice to have dreams, but dreams die, and without a 401k for his family, how is he going to provide? Eminem literally says in the middle of the interview on the Monroe, Michigan public access television, “I can’t tell if you’re joking or serious right now.”

That’s because the year this was filmed, Eminem earned — was not worth — earned thirty-one million dollars from his rap. It’s not entirely clear that he doesn’t come close to actually fighting him.

It’s a fascinating study as people treat Colbert like a high schooler: what’s next? You gonna land on your feet? While others mock him as if the only place he’d get hired is public access television.

Clearly he brought more viewers to public access television than CBS draws for CBS Mornings, NBC’s NBA tip off, ABC’s Celebrity Jeopardy, Shark Tank, SNL, My View with Lara Trump, Fallon, WWE, NHL Playoffs on TNT, or the Daily Show. Because that rat we talked about who said he’d be on the show?

Only in Monroe — Monroe Michigan’s public access television — had two million viewers that night. That’s right: Colbert draws a bigger audience on local access television than CBS can on international news and sports.

UPDATE THANKS TO TIP FROM ROBB JK JONES: COLBERT DID A NEW EPISODE THAT DROPPED 11 HOURS AGO — 

Personally? His joy in sorrow after his father and two brothers were killed in a plane wreck also happened to be one of the reasons I didn’t kill myself in high school.

But that’s a story for another time…

Before you leave, I want to remind you all that the play adaptation of OVERMORROW will do a free staged reading in Times Square Friday. Theater 315, 7pm. Tickets here and they’re going fast.

Also: in the book I was “the author,” in the play I’m “the playwright,” so I’ll be playing that role. The bits don’t really work without that.

Other upcoming tour dates / events —

• May 28 — panel on Les Miserables for Margaret Ferrec’s gallery on the art for the visual journey version Tyndale is releasing. 6:30 for art viewing, program will begin at 7:30 — Hephzibah house’s gallery.

• July 18 + 19 — 15th Annual New York City Poetry Festival w/ Alliteration and Forgotten Ground Regained editor Paul Deane, ArtHouse, and many others NOLAN PARK, GOVERNORS ISLAND

May also apply for Queen’s night markets, we’re teasing out what that might look like…

I applied for NY Comicon as well as some other regional things. I… think it’s likely LA WorldCon is out for me, which breaks my heart. I feel like the WorldCon / World Fantasy sort of things are locked in diaspora, wandering through the desert, and we’ll meet up like long lost lovers one of these days.

1. I generally hate hipster philosophy, but I do have a knee-jerk reaction against things everyone talks about such as, for instance, the novel Yesteryear, which I guarantee I won’t read now.