By: Daiman Teer for The Simpleton Star
The announcement that Stephen Colbert’s next move involves writing a Lord of the Rings film is the greatest work of fiction he’s ever been a part of. It isn’t a career move. It isn’t a creative “pivot” to a higher calling. It’s a strategic fog machine designed to hide the fact that his time on a national stage has reached its expiration date.
To understand what’s actually happening here, you have to look back at the thoroughbred racing world in the 1960s. There was a famous trainer who eventually ran out of luck and clients because he had finally screwed his last paying customer
Instead of admitting he was finished, the trainer vanished and started a rumor that he’d moved to Europe and that he had found great success as the leading trainer in a foreign capital and was busy winning massive purses that no one back home could track. It was a perfect, untouchable lie — until he was spotted at the local supermarket on a Tuesday afternoon.
Just like that sniveling horse trainer, Stephen Colbert is currently hiding in the frozen food aisle.
The headlines today aren’t reporting on a new cinematic masterpiece. They’re reporting on a face-saving play. By attaching Colbert’s name to a massive, untouchable franchise like Middle-Earth, Colbert is buying himself a dignity-preservation project. It’s a way to exit his show without the “unbankable” label sticking to him. If you tell the world you’re busy writing an epic for Peter Jackson, no one notices that your actual show was retired because the numbers didn’t justify the electricity it took to keep the cameras on.
The idea that a man who spent decades reading a teleprompter and chasing cheap applause is suddenly the architect of a multi-billion-dollar fantasy world is a joke. He isn’t a screenwriter. He’s a fan with a platform and a set of well-placed friends who are willing to lend their prestige to a press release as a parting gift. To suggest he’s “co-writing” alongside industry veterans is an insult to every writer who has ever spent their life actually learning the craft. It’s like saying a guy who wins a “Trainer for a Day” contest is suddenly qualified to prep a horse for a major stakes race.
This is the ultimate insider racket. In a business where real writers are struggling to get past gatekeepers, the elite simply hand out “scriptwriter” titles to their friends to help them land softly after a failure. By picking obscure characters like the Barrow-wights or Tom Bombadil, he’s chosen a project that can sit in development hell for a decade. When the movie inevitably fails to materialize, he can blame “creative differences” or “studio restructuring” instead of admitting that he never had the goods to begin with.
The public is being sold a dream of a second act, but those who know the industry can see the smoke and mirrors. Colbert is a man whose cultural currency has been devalued until there’s nothing left in the vault. He isn’t ascending to a higher plane of artistry. He’s just a host whose contract wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.
He can wrap himself in the Shire’s ivy all he wants, but it won’t change the reality of the situation. The show is over and the audience has moved on. He isn’t writing the next great epic. He’s just a guy in a supermarket who’s hoping you don’t realize he’s still in town.
BIBLE VERSE
“For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” — Mark 8:36
WHY I CHOSE THIS VERSE
In the pursuit of staying relevant, it’s easy to trade away one’s integrity for a headline that keeps the lights on for just a few more minutes. This verse reminds us that no matter how much “prestige” we accumulate or how many high-level “pivots” we claim to make, the cost of a hollow victory is the loss of one’s true standing.
LET US PRAY:
Lord, grant us the strength to face our endings with honesty and the grace to walk away from the table when our time is up. Let us not be consumed by the need for a false image, but rather find peace in the work we have actually done. Amen.
