Just Time for a Quick Recap: A Look at What it’s Like to Attend Tapings for Two of America’s Most Popular Talk Shows

New York City is home to some of the world’s best museums, eateries, nightclubs, parks, and shopping destinations. This is why, during a recent trip to Manhattan, my primary goals were to skip through all of those places as fast as possible in order to attend tapings for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.

Like many Americans of a certain age, I grew up on a steady diet of late night talk shows. I’m also not a religious man, but the Ed Sullivan Theater is something of a Mecca for me. Located along Broadway in Manhattan’s Theater District, it served as the launching point for The Beatles conquest of America in the early 1960s and the home of David Letterman’s long-running talk show for a little over two decades. It’s currently inhabited by Stephen Colbert, who took over Letterman’s spot on American broadcaster CBS’ late-night lineup in 2015.

After a shaky start and some tough competition from Jimmy Fallon’s run on The Tonight Show, which films at the nearby NBC Studios at 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Colbert has managed to bounce back in the crowded field of late night American television following the improbable arrival of Donald Trump in the White House. A veteran of political comedy shows, including his own Colbert Report on Comedy Central, Colbert was well-suited to serve as one of the country’s premiere jesters during what has become its most controversial political era in at least a generation.

The exterior of the Ed Sullivan Theater.

YouTube clips of his monologues and interviews regularly drum up millions of views from all over the world, but Colbert isn’t the only political comedian whose show has attracted international attention. Fellow Comedy Central alum and British expat John Oliver has also attracted a large following online for segments that air during his rapid-fire HBO show Last Week Tonight.

But what is it like to attend tapings for one of these shows, and how does one go about getting tickets? Here’s a rundown that covers the process along with what you might encounter at them. A quick word of advice: don’t drink a large beverage prior to your arrival unless your bladder is made of solid steel. Opportunities to use the toilets are few and far between and could become an issue.

How to Get Tickets

Competition among American late night hosts for viewership is as fierce as it’s ever been. Along with Fallon and Colbert’s shows, other late night programs that tape in Manhattan alone include: The Daily Show, Saturday Night Live, Late Night, What Happens Live, and Full Frontal. Despite all the options, making arrangements to see one of them live can be downright difficult. American broadcasters don’t typically charge fees to attend these shows, for one thing. Nabbing tickets for Oliver’s Sunday night tapings can be particularly vexing. They often disappear within seconds of them being made available online.

If you’re up for the challenge, start keeping tabs on the official website for Last Week Tonight tickets at least three months prior to your arrival in New York City. At the time of this writing in late April of 2019, tickets will soon be made available for early June. They usual drop on Tuesday evenings, UK time.

But they go extremely fast. The very second they appear online, you’ll need to be ready to swiftly fill out the online form with your information. Don’t be daunted by the requests for an American address and phone number. As the small print on the website notes: ‘when filling out the form, please use either the telephone number and zip code of the place you will be staying while you are in the US, or you can just complete the telephone number and zip code portion of the form with ten 0’s for the phone number (000–000–0000) and five 0’s for the zip code (00000).’

Even if you manage to make the cut, you may not immediately receive actual tickets. My partner and I weren’t notified until the morning of the taping on 7 April that we’d been selected. We received an email asking if we still wanted to attend. There’s also a standby line that opens at 17:30 for the truly daring at The CBS Broadcast Center on West 57th Street where Last Week Tonight is taped.

Grabbing tickets for Colbert’s show is significantly less stressful, if only because it typically tapes Monday through Thursday. Tickets are often still available a few weeks out. Nevertheless, it would be a good idea to keep an eye on the show’s website for tickets at least a month prior to your trip if you’d like to go.

What to Expect at Last Week Tonight

I’m not going to pretend to be an absolute authority on what you might find at the studios for either of these programs, but here’s what my partner and I encountered. We arrived at The CBS Broadcast Center a few minutes past 17:30 for the 14 April taping of Last Week Tonight. A staff member told us to step to the back of the line behind about five other people. A few minutes later, we were led inside and went through a security checkpoint.

Then we were sent to a long, gray room lined with posters for various CBS shows. Another staffer told us we’d remain there for about an hour until it was time to head upstairs to the studio. Slowly but surely, the chairs that lined the walls filled with mostly 20-somethings who looked like NYU students. Over the course of the next hour, we were repeatedly told that removing our phones once we were in the studio would lead to us being immediately booted. We were also warned about ten times to use the toilet because we’d be ‘heading up any minute now.’

The grey waiting room at Last Week Tonight.

For reasons that probably don’t need to be explained here, stepping out of this room almost guaranteed an encounter with the young staffers tasked with preventing anyone from wandering off into the rest of the building. Making eye contact with any of them resulted in an instantaneous ‘do you have a question?’ or ‘can I help you with something?’

Our hour wait slowly grew to two hours as we watched a line of people being led through the hallway outside. A slight amount of paranoia began to creep around the room as the guys next to me began wondering what was going on. Who were those people? Why did they get to go to the studio before us? The one to my left did an impression of Tony Soprano and said ‘he’d have to talk to some people’ if we somehow weren’t let into the studio after all this waiting.

We became further agitated as we watched a group of people across the room who’d arrived after us get led upstairs to the studio. Maybe there was a method to the staff’s madness, but this was particularly annoying since we were under the impression this was a ‘first come, first served’ situation.

Around 19:30, we were finally told to step into an elevator to head upstairs to the studio. As you may already know, tapings for American broadcasts typically kickoff with a warm-up comedian who attempts to pump up the audience and give them information about when to cheer and laugh. This one reminded us repeatedly to laugh out loud at any joke and keep our energy up. ‘Internal laughing,’ as he put it, was verboten.

Oliver himself came out afterwards for a short Q&A and apologized for the long wait. As he explained, the show’s legal staff were particularly concerned about that evening’s main segment — a lengthy critique of America’s pharmaceutical industry and the ongoing opioid crisis. They’d spent most of the afternoon and evening pouring over the script to hopefully offset any potential legal issues.

The Q&A was actually pretty great, and Oliver’s snappy responses to the audience’s questions were genuinely hilarious. They included inquiries about why he pounds on his desk at the beginning of each show (because he’s excited about what they’re about to do and filled with nervous energy), and what sort of voice he did for his role in Disney’s upcoming remake of The Lion King movie and if he would sing for us (he used his typical singing voice and wouldn’t sing because he was worried about being sued by, as he put it, ‘The Mouse’).

Because the taping was starting almost an hour late, Oliver quickly took his place at his desk and got to work. As his warm-up comedian explained, he rarely messes up and the live tapings are typically what you see later that evening on HBO or over on YouTube. Sure enough, that’s pretty much what happened. He only tripped up once before having to start over.

The sight of Oliver rapidly blasting through the lengthy script was truly something to behold. It was almost like watching a fighter pilot fly an F-16. During cutaways, he adjusted his glasses and shifted in his seat before immediately returning his eyes to the monitor in front of him. The level of concentration involved obviously required countless hours of practice. Meanwhile, staffers located on either side of the audience watched us carefully to make sure nobody was taping the show on their phones.

One of the entrances that lead up to the studio for Last Week Tonight.

At the end of the segment about the opioid crisis, a few stagehands in the rafters dumped cardboard boxes full of mock legal documents on his head. Oliver had to pretend he was enjoying having them rained down on him while the credits rolled. Once he held the pose for long enough, a stage manager told him he’d have to redo one bit because he said ‘13’ instead of ‘30.’

The fallen papers were removed from his desk, but the rest of the studio’s set remained covered in them. If you watch the episode yourself, you can see Oliver clearly saying the wrong number with a swiftly overdubbed ‘30’ in its place. You also won’t see those papers because much of the show consists of shots of Oliver at the desk with the rest of the studio out of view. As he explained to the audience prior to the reshoot, ‘that’s right, television is a lie.’

We were told to remain in our seats until Oliver left the studio. Then each section was led to a nearby stairwell that led to the street below. We were allowed to use the toilets again though as we left. The potty situation over at Colbert’s program was a different situation altogether.

What to Expect at The Late Show

Audience members are advised to arrive at the Ed Sullivan Theater between 15:00 and 16:00 on the afternoons of tapings. A lengthy queue was already snaking around the sidewalk out front when we arrived at about 15:15 on 16 April. We joined the back of the line after being given blue arm bracelets. About 30 minutes later, we were slowly brought inside.

The foyer within the theater is rather grey and drab. Aside from some decorative moldings along the ceiling, there’s not much to look at beyond a few televisions mounted on the walls that air random clips from the program. Picture yourself standing in a queue at Disney World but located within a parking garage. We were put into the second of two rooms and were told we’d only get one opportunity to use the toilet. There would also be no option to use it after the taping, which we were warned could take up to two hours.

The also grey foyer over at The Late Show.

Within about 15 minutes, an elderly Scottish couple beside us had begun grumbling. All the standing around like cattle in a feedlot wasn’t doing their legs any favors. After a quick toilet trek downstairs that once again involved staffers monitoring our every move in the hallways, we returned to the queue for what became a somewhat excruciating wait. The program clips on the televisions ran in a 30 minute or so cycle. The crowd wasn’t really in the mood to laugh the second time through and morale really seemed to be dropping in the moments leading up to us being allowed in the studio.

Along with the Scottish couple, we were led to a row of seats about four rows back from the stage, but off to the far left of the theater behind a row of cameras. I took a chance that the staff would have mercy on me and asked for a second trip to the toilet. They agreed, and I soon found myself being followed downstairs by nearly a dozen other audience members.

Like over at Last Week Tonight, a warm-up comedian emerged from backstage to pump up the crowd. Unfortunately, it was a guy named Paul Mecurio, a former attorney known for his aggressive put-down humor. It didn’t really mesh with The Late Show’s vibe, especially after Colbert arrived on stage to solemnly direct the audience’s attention to the ceiling, which featured a projection of Notre-Dame’s famed Rose Sud stained glass window. At the time of the taping, the cathedral was still ablaze. Sadly, the ceiling isn’t viewable from the seats on the main floor. As Colbert quipped: ‘sometimes it’s good to wind up in the cheap seats.’

After the house band was introduced and they played a song, a quick Q&A with Colbert followed. It included questions about university majors and which part he would want to play if he ever appeared in a Broadway musical (Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar so he could perform ‘Heaven on Their Minds,’ which the band played so he could sing a few lines).

We were once again warned not to take our phones out for any reason in the theater, and that we’d be ejected if we did. Staffers and security guards took their places along the edge of the stage while the cameras were moved into their spots. Then a quick comedy bit played on the monitors along with the program’s nightly intro sequence before Colbert returned to begin his monologue.

One of the things that is largely unknown by audiences watching the show at home is that the interviews conducted aren’t necessarily broadcast later that evening, primarily due to the complicated schedules of the guests and whatever they’re promoting. This taping ran long because there was one additional interview the crew needed to get through: one with Robert De Niro who was there to promote The Tribeca Film Festival.

It seemed like most of the audience didn’t know that De Niro was on hand until Colbert introduced him (we’d looked at the rundown on the scheduled guests for the week beforehand so we figured he might be there). The crowd went wild.

De Niro, who’s had a reputation going back decades for being prickly during televised interviews, begrudgingly went along with Colbert’s gags, which included taking a few bites from a hot fudge sundae. The musical guest being taped that night was Cage the Elephant, a rock band fronted by the eccentric Matt Schultz who strolled onto the stage in a skin-tight black catsuit and a cowboy hat. He requested a kiss from Colbert for good luck before the band began playing and the host obliged. That moment, sadly, did not wind up making it to broadcast when their segment aired a few days later on 19 April.

‘It’s a free show, what do you want?’

This was one of Mecurio’s quips, and he has a point. Nevertheless, is attending one of these tapings during a visit to New York City really worth all the waiting around? That really depends on your interest in media production, the shows themselves, and/or the off-chance one of your favorite celebrities or musical acts will be there.

However, if you, like me, have a bladder the size of a hamster’s, it may not be worth the physical agony you’re likely to encounter during the final 30 minutes of a Late Show taping. As amusing as it was to watch De Niro being a Grumpy Gus mere footsteps from our seats, having to run over to the Starbucks across Broadway to use its toilet once we were allowed out of the theater wasn’t a laugh riot.