Farewell to 'The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson'

Tonight, at 12:30 am, Craig Ferguson will sign off the Late Late Show for the last time.  I started watching the show in 2009.  I was going into my senior year of high school and Craig had been hosting for about four years.  Somehow I feel like I've been there since day one, and at the same time that it's been there my whole life.  I imagine this is because of the old adage about growing older, that the more things change the more they stay the same.  Arghh.

I'm having a bit of a quarter-life crisis and
I want to talk like an old sea captain.
Please let me have this.

When I first started watching Craig Ferguson a staple of his show was hand puppetry.  Many a cold open starred the Cajun crocodile named Wavy Rancheros, Sid the profane bunny, or Gustave Flaubert the pig who shares a contempt for the bourgeoisie with the human Gustave who I still know nothing about five years later.

Eh, the pig is more interesting.

The puppets were such an integral part of the show that they took it over for the 1,000th episode while Craig was nowhere to be seen.  Now it's the puppets that are out of sight, in their place is the robot skeleton Geoff Peterson and a horse that isn't a real horse.  Of course, some things have stayed the same.  It's still a good day for America and a cat still dies but not really before we recap what we learned, althoug in my humble opinion a new picture of Paul McCartney couldn't have hurt.

Perhaps a more glamorous image of
the music icon is in order.

Few, if any, talk shows could make such major changes without losing the spirit of the show, but the Late Late Show is not like any other late night show.  It could be whatever Craig wanted it to be because the appeal was that he was making it all up as he went along.  The stage was his white void, where he could build the universe the way he wanted unless the malicious cartoonist of a censor didn't like it.  Now that vast emptiness is closing in on itself and Craig is moving on to a new adventure: he and Geoff are going to walk the earth and solve crimes.  Or he's going to start a new show that will be basically the same as the old one.