Stephen Colbert (The Colbert Report)

Stephen Colbert, former host of The Colbert Report, soon to be hosting The Late Show (sep 8th).
Like most people, I first saw Stephen on The Daily Show, where he worked as one of the "correspondents".
From the moment he started working there, you could immediatly spot the talent.
A lot of talent.

This became even more apparent when Stephen Colbert started to host his own show, The Colbert Report, which aired from 11:30 to 12:00 in the evening, right after The Daily Show.
Even though the premise of the show was identical to The Daily Show, which is to bring news and information wrapped in comedy to the public, the show itself certainly wasn't.

Stephen Colbert took the concept of The Daily Show in a whole new direction.
He made it his own, and very succesfully, which given the limitations of using the same framework certainly is not an easy task.
The thing Stephen really excelled at were his interviews, which were always Jon Stewarts only real weakness.

Stephen is a master of improvisation.
Even when caught off-guard, he immediatly plays into the new situation and delivers comedy gold.
And as a host, he managed to draw all the focus to him and not used any "correspondents" like on The Daily Show, which made his job much harder.

And yet, I have never seen a bad episode.
And I have seen them all, at least 5 times.
Given how many episodes were made (well over 1000) that is a huge accomplishment.
In some ways then, The Colbert Report was even better then The Daily Show, and praise doesn't get any higher then that.