Jack White Joins Stephen Colbert on Public Access in Monroe After Late Show Finale

The night after wrapping his nearly decade-long run on CBS, Stephen Colbert walked onto a deliberately low-rent set in Monroe, Michigan. The program was Only In Monroe, a local public access show that in 2015 hosted a test run of The Late Show before its network debut. This time, it felt less like a dry run than an intentional next act. Colbert co-hosted with Michelle Baumann and Kaye Lani Rae Rafko Wilson on Thursday, May 21, occupying the 11:35 p.m. slot with a lineup that included actor Steve Buscemi, Michigan native Jeff Daniels, and Jack White as music director.

White, a Detroit fixture, set a tone rooted in garage-rock directness. The hour veered from Colbert inhaling helium to sing the White Stripes’ “Fell In Love With A Girl” to the two sharing a hot dog on camera. The set itself became a prop: at the end, the group dismantled it while Eminem appeared via video as a fire marshal, giving permission to burn the debris in a dumpster.

Jack White’s Instagram post the same evening gave the broadcast a harder edge. “America needs to give a standing ovation for this man tonight,” he wrote, addressing Colbert directly. “It is absolutely ridiculous that we live in a country where a President’s ego can vindictively censor network television … and nobody stops him.” The post referred to political pressure on late-night programming, and though not named explicitly, Donald Trump had earlier that day tweeted an AI-generated video depicting himself throwing Colbert into a dumpster.

Colbert’s pivot from a flagship network show to a community station, with a musician who recently funded his own pressing plant to bypass industry bottlenecks, carries a quiet logic. In Monroe, the jokes landed for an audience of locals rather than ratings, and the music came without clearance forms. The episode now lives online, prompting more questions than any press release could about where cultural credibility actually sits.