jeb bush

Last night, Stephen Colbert proved that he is a more than worthy successor to David Letterman’s desk at The Late Show.

Throughout the history of late night talk shows, the first episode is often characterized by awkwardness, confusion, and a sort of frantic energy that aims to just keep the ship together as it barely has embarked on what’s supposed to be a long, long voyage.

However, Stephen Colbert was not only groomed to be a late night talk show host, but with his time at The Colbert Report, had built all the muscles necessary to be a late night talk show host, in character or not.

It should come as no surprise that, Colbert had no stilted moments in his monologue and ran a tight ship right from the opening sequence to paying tribute to Letterman to touring the new and improved Ed Sullivan Theater to the closing credits of his debut night on The Late Show. It might sound obvious to say, but one definitely got the sense after watching the inaugural episode that Stephen has been doing this late night thing for awhile.

You can see that Colbert, even sans character, can still properly stick it to Trump.

While some might clamor for the more rambunctious, satirical Colbert of The Colbert Report to do the interviews of the likes of George Clooney and especially Jeb Bush, Stephen manages inject some trademark cleverness in conversation. Hopefully, he’ll play that up more down the line.

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is still very much a very traditional late night talk show with a monologue, suit, band, desk pieces, guests, etc., but Colbert showed on his very first night, how this old format can still be done well in 2015. For that, Stephen should be marked down for one of the best late night debuts of all time.

On top of that, Colbert had a thoroughly interesting inclusion of Jimmy Fallon throughout the show that almost seemed like an olive branch between the two late night hosts on different networks. We’ll be curious to see if that makes a decidedly different route for this era of late night as compared to the debacles of the last one.

Whether you watched the premiere or not (odds are that you were on of the 6.5 million that did), we urge you to watch the entire premiere episode when you make a spare hour for yourself.