The Colbert Report really ought to have become tiresome by now. Unlike The Daily Show, where there's a rotating team of comedians to share the first 20 minutes of the show with Jon Stewart, TCR's parody of one-man rantfests like The O'Reilly Factor means that most of the time we're just seeing Colbert talking to us in-character. And the format is almost Kabuki-level rigid. So why does it still work? Partly because the writers have managed to create enough running gags -- story arcs, if you will -- that we're actually tuning in to see what's happened to the Colbert character since the last episode.

The most recent example of this was the way the writers handled Colbert's breaking his wrist. This was, of course, written into the show, and we got the ongoing storyline of Colbert's campaign against "wrist violence" (which, like almost everything on the show, is a parody of the way TV pundits think their own obsessions are of vital interest to everyone). But we've also gotten the story of Colbert's character pulling a Limbaugh and becoming addicted to painkillers. This story followed a logical progression and reached a climax of sorts in the episode where Colbert couldn't do the opening because he couldn't find his pills. Another ongoing storyline is the increasingly desperate attempts of Prescott Pharmaseuticals (sponsor of "Cheating Death With Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, D.F.A.") to make a generic drug for every possible need, regardless of the hideous side effects. These stories have made Colbert less like a fake-news show and more like a weird one-man comedy-drama, where we're actually wondering what will happen to him next.