Stephen Colbert will make his Late Show debut this fall, CBS announced today.  The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will officially bow on September 8th, giving us a bit of a breather after David Letterman departs the show in May.  Letterman, of course, originated the CBS talk show after he was famously passed over for the Tonight Show gig at NBC in favor of Jay Leno, and so Colbert will be the second ever host of the CBS series.  I’ve been immensely enjoying Letterman’s iteration of the show since he announced his retirement (he's happy and, frankly, is just having fun with his guests now), and I’ll be genuinely sad to see him go.  The guy is one of the greats and he is surely irreplaceable, so I’m eager to see how Colbert sets his iteration apart.

Colbert ended his run of The Colbert Report last month, so he’ll spend the next nine months developing what his version of The Late Show will look like.  In the meantime, CBS has no plans to use guest hosts or specials to fill in the gap between Letterman and Colbert—they’ll instead just be airing reruns of primetime series in the 11:35pm slot all summer.