You feel asleep before it started, Savage? Lucky you. I don't have a TV, so I made plans to sleep in a friend's empty apartment last night, a friend who has TV, just so I could watch it, because Stephen Colbert is a genius, such a genius that when I found out he would be on network TV now I vaguely thought about maybe getting a TV again. At the very least I was dead set on watching the first episode because I wanted to watch him break the mold, because the New York Times piece over the weekend implied he'd maybe done away with the monologue at the top of the show, because it's Stephen Colbert! Hero to a generation. The man who made fun of George W. Bush to his face. The guy who reinvented TV comedy via sarcasm and satire.

And... I couldn't believe how not funny it was.

He came out, he stood there, and he gave a monologue. My heart sank slightly. But it was going to be really funny, right? Um. "You're all witnessing TV history, and like most history, it's not on the History Channel." That works if fake conservative pundit Colbert says it, but when real Colbert says it? Similarly, at one point, brushed off his shoulders like he was some big cheese, like he was being glamorous with his hair or something, and without the ironic crust of the Colbert persona, it was off-putting. The giant thing missing, the extra joke on top of the jokes that we all got used to during The Colbert Report and that now makes most variety shows seem so earnest and blank, was gone, and overall the show came off as earnest and blank.

It will get better. Dude's a perfectionist. It was the first show. There was a pretty funny Trump bit on gorging on Trump like you gorge on Oreos, and there was a funny fake-sponsor bit about Sabra hummus and snacks that he was forced to do by a cursed amulet sitting out on his desk (long story). But he clearly felt self-conscious about performing in Letterman's long shadow, and he did all kinds of Letterman-ish fidgeting like seeing a smudge on his glasses and wiping it off with his coat while a joke landed (or didn't land, as happened more often than you expected). There were even Letterman-lite jokes about Les Moonves, featuring the actual Les Moonves. No laughs.

The monologue was a dud, George Clooney was a dud, Jimmy Fallon was a dud, and then Jeb! came out, the dud in chief. He was awkward and fulsome right off the bat, saying as he stepped onto the stage, before anything had happened, "This is incredible. This is on my highlight reel for sure." He was blushing a thousand times harder than Colbert was, he looked his usual mix of adrift and uptight, and the first question, why did he want to be president, seemed to catch him off guard.

"Cuz I think we're on the verge of the greatest time to be alive, but government isn't working," he stammered. I think he said "inint" instead of "isn't" he was stammering so hard. I felt bad for him. "Washington is a complete basket case," the complete basket case added.

Colbert kept referring to him as "JEB!" which was funny—"JEB!"—and he asked him about the exclamation point, what the exclamation point was all about, and the answer was: "Because I've been using Jeb! since 1994. It connotes excitement."

That got more laughs than "JEB!" expected. "It connotes excitement."

I should never have watched the first episode. Of course it would be awkward and flat and of course there would be more ads than show and of course I'm being harder on it than anyone would be on anyone else's first show. But, no, it did not make me want to go get TV again, in fact it made me glad I didn't have TV all the more. The whole thing connoted excitement. But it was not exciting.