Which late-night show did Stephen Colbert host before taking over CBS’s The Late Show?

Stephen Colbert hosted The Colbert Report before taking over CBS’s The Late Show.

The Colbert Report premiered on Comedy Central in 2005 as a spin-off of The Daily Show. Colbert played a fictionalized, strongly opinionated television commentator whose exaggerated certainty satirized political punditry and cable-news conventions.

The series ended in December 2014 when Colbert left the role. In September 2015, he began hosting The Late Show on CBS, succeeding David Letterman. The move required Colbert to shift from playing a satirical character to presenting a conventional version of himself as a late-night host.

The two programs are sometimes conflated because both used political comedy and commentary. However, The Colbert Report was the Comedy Central series, while The Late Show is the CBS franchise. The answer is the former program’s exact title.