Harry Styles And Tom Cruise Ushered James Corden’s Late Late Show Into Final, Blissful Silence

Harry Styles And Tom Cruise Ushered James Corden’s Late Late Show Into Final, Blissful Silence

Breathe. You’re OK. It’s done. It’s over. Great Britain’s most insufferable musical-theater dork will no longer darken the American airwaves. We can all pretend the last eight years were a disturbing hallucination, like we all took tainted shrooms and then fell asleep watching Glee highlights on YouTube. There will be no more James Corden Late Late Show. It finally ended last night.

James Corden, you will not be sad to learn, did not get to do everything that he wanted to do in his CBS tenure. In one interview, Corden lamented that he never got Beyoncé to do Carpool Karaoke because “schedules just never quite aligned.” In another, he told Howard Stern that he wished he could’ve had Paul Simon in the fake car. The window is now closed. Beyoncé and Paul Simon resisted the temptation to do bits on television. Salute.

One person who did not resist that temptation is Tom Cruise. Last night, after James Corden began his final Late Late Show with a numbing musical-number Donna Summer parody — “Last Show,” you see — he brought in Tom Cruise for a 92-hour segment about learning to be in the Lion King musical. This one started with another genuinely astonishing Cruise airplane stunt — imagine if Tom Cruise died while doing bits with James Corden — and it ended, naturally, with Tom Cruise singing. Who wouldn’t want to recreate the magic of the Rock Of Ages movie? This morning, we’re all living like a lover with a radar phone.

The show itself also had Corden doing bits with Will Ferrell and various other late-night hosts — Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon, David Letterman, Trevor Noah. Then Corden chatted with Ferrell, who hit something with a sledgehammer, and Harry Styles. I’m sure Harry Styles said all kinds of interesting things, but I just couldn’t wait to hear James Corden sing again. That’s how the show ended. James Corden singing. Again. (Harry Styles, the one actual singer on the show, did not sing, unless I scanned past it.)

If you’ve spent any time reading this website over the past eight years, you may have witnessed the quiet psychodrama of me having to write about these James Corden videos. Most of the time, I don’t pick what to write about on this website. If you see me waxing ecstatic about some hardcore band with less than 10,000 monthly listeners, that’s me. If you see the words “James Corden” ever again, that’s Scott punishing me. I have no idea why you, the person who does not work for Scott, would want to watch any of the bullshit that I just described. But if you do — if you hate yourself that much — it’s below. It’s all below.

My greatest enemy has been defeated. What will I do with my life now?

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