Stephen Colbert asked mostly toothless questions during an interview with Jeb Bush on his first episode as the host of “The Late Show.” PHOTOGRAPH BY JEFFREY R. STAAB/CBS VIA GETTY

Last night, Stephen Colbert débuted his latest persona: Stephen Colbert, friendly populist. The results were mixed, but the results were guaranteed to be mixed, only one night in. If you were a fan of previous iterations of Stephen Colbert, it’s difficult not to want him to succeed at his splashy new job. For guys like Colbert, whatever their comedic origins, late night is and always has been the big leagues.

But, while I adored the nimble satire of “The Colbert Report” and was crazy about Colbert on “Strangers With Candy”—heck, I thought Colbert was great in the musical production of “Company”—I can’t pretend to instantly love “The Late Show.” Late-night network TV is a different platform from what Colbert had on Comedy Central: it’s rigid, square, corporate, dull. It has become impossible to separate any show of this type from the so-called “late-night wars,” the model of media coverage that—even more than the usual coverage of network television—conflates ratings and ad dollars with the question of whether a show is any good. (That is, funny or interesting.) I’ve written before about the monotony of late-night’s maleness, and now all four of the once-open job spots have closed again, leaving four more guy hosts. It’s an issue that Colbert himself hinted at in one gag, when he and Jimmy Fallon joked about seeing one another in the locker room. In the TV business, this is what’s known as “hanging a lamp on it.”

And yet I want to believe—to imagine a version of this show that might be just as cerebral and decent and innovative and daring as the imaginary version of Stephen Colbert that has been built up in my head over the years. (What is it with these middle-aged male comics being received by our culture as philosopher-gurus? It’s no good for anyone.) Last night, Colbert was a charmer: he was confident and seemed delighted to be there. He danced onstage as the band played, spinning like a little kid. He did a nice throwaway about his desk being “carved from a single piece of desk.” And he did many very Colbert-y things: a nerd bit, a humility bit, a musical bit. He was strikingly Dad-like, emphasizing patriotism with diverse montages and the band playing “Everyday People,” accompanied by a joyous Mavis Staples. (He even opened with a nationwide rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner”!) Although Colbert gave credit to David Letterman as an influence, he only faintly resembled him: the new Colbert was a uniter, not a divider.

He also presented himself as a solid corporate citizen. In the wake of the new fall season, Colbert did jokes about CBS shows, at one point remarking, “I feel like a Third Broke Girl.” CBS president Les Moonves was there, for a gag about “The Mentalist.” One of Colbert’s most successful bits, which made me giggle, was about a cursed amulet that groaned from the set. That amulet had forced him, Colbert confessed, to “make certain … regrettable compromises.” Then, while pretending that he was under the amulet’s compulsion, he shilled for Sabra hummus and Rold Gold pretzels. This was followed by a routine in which Oreos became a metaphor for the addictiveness of Trump clips. These integrated ads (call ’em what they are) are surely a job requirement: Colbert’s openness to them, his eager embrace of “sponsortunities” on his last show, his willingness to blur paid mentions and unpaid ones, likely made him an appealing hire for CBS. But that doesn’t mean they’re not gross. As anyone who has ever watched Jimmy Fallon knows, the job of a late-night talk-show host features a great deal of enthusiastic shilling for people, places, and things. Hosting is the ability to align one’s charm—or, in Colbert’s case, his decency and intelligence—with brands. Letterman was famously terrible at this part of the job. I’ll miss that level of incompetence.

Colbert's more admirable skill—and the thing that one expects will be a highlight of the show in the future—is his ability to do energetic, probing interviews. Yet Colbert’s sit-down with Jeb Bush was a strange one. Mostly, Bush got to spout off talking points, branding himself as a benign presence, who was, unlike Trump, a small-government conservative interested in “fiscal restraint.” The two men joked about logos. It was aggressively collegial, a kick in the shins to anyone who worried that Colbert would be some liberal muckraker. Colbert did one gentle ambush, which involved a staged interaction with his own brother, designed to elicit a genuine answer from Jeb: Could he name a policy difference between himself and his brother George? In response, Jeb simply emphasized, once again, that, unlike George, he was a small-government conservative who favored “fiscal restraint.” No one brought up the war. Colbert is smart. But the toothlessness was unnerving. Jeb Bush was Sabra hummus, plugging itself.

The George Clooney segment was far more low-energy, with the two men satirizing the faux-chumminess of such interviews—a familiar shtick, post-Letterman. There was talk about Clooney’s work in Darfur, followed, somewhat abruptly, by gags about Clooney’s marriage having turned him into “arm candy” (“just be shiny and pretty”), and then a fake-clips routine. It doesn’t have to be this way, and I’m betting that it won’t be, in the near future. If there’s got to be another man sitting behind another desk that is carved from a whole desk, I’d certainly rather have it be a smart guy like Colbert.

And we’ll see how things change—or if change itself, on late night, is possible. Right now, Colbert’s brand suggests a reach-across-the-aisle patriotism, which was Jeb’s brand, too—and also, for that matter, Obama’s, back when he was running for President. It's the brand that gets you elected: the Big Tent. For months, I’ve been curious to see Colbert without his mask on, excited to see what he’d say when his opinions were his own. But, of course, no one goes on TV without a mask. If I want something more aggressive, more specific, more like the satirist than the salesman, can you blame me? “The Late Show” opened with a gorgeous new credits sequence, which turned New York into a small town using the techinique of “tilt-shift photography.” That’s a tool that is designed to cut massive things down to size. Now that Colbert holds a stage as wide as the nation, I hope he doesn’t entirely lose that skill.