What’s Craig Ferguson Been Up To Since Leaving ‘The Late Late Show’?

“It’s a great day for America!” Craig Ferguson exclaimed at the top of nearly all his 2,000-plus Late Late Show episodes from 2004 to 2014. Post-Trump, when I hear someone describe themselves as a “patriot,” I brace for a pro-gun, pro-life, anti-immigrant, climate change-denying tirade. Not so when Ferguson was a fixture on network television.

Born in Scotland, Ferguson had such unbridled enthusiasm for this country that he actively sought honorary citizenship from each state in the union (receiving it from more than a dozen states) before he was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2008, a ceremony he aired on his show. The next year, he not only published the memoir American on Purpose: The Improbably Adventures of an Unlikely Patriot but also, during an appearance on The View, showed off a new forearm tattoo of Founding Father Benjamin Franklin’s “Join or Die” political cartoon, which championed colonial sovereignty 18 years before it was achieved in 1776. For years—with the exception of the first show after a terrible national tragedy like the Boston Marathon bombing—Ferguson provided a sincere, nightly reminder that despite whatever personal drudgery and misfortune befalls us, those who call the world’s oldest democracy home are incredibly fortunate. I miss hearing him say these words, and I wonder whether his catchphrase would have survived once co-opted by the “Make America Great Again” movement (per an appearance on Larry King Now, this time last year, Ferguson was supporting Bernie Sanders).

In a decade with lots of late-night host turnover, April 2014 was overrun with major network announcements. First, David Letterman disclosed his impending retirement. Just a week later, CBS revealed that Stephen Colbert would inherit Letterman’s Late Show, which encouraged Comedy Central to publish details about the end of The Colbert Report. Before the month’s end, Ferguson—whose Late Late Show immediately followed The Late Show and was helmed by Letterman’s production company—declared that he too would vacate his CBS time slot. Conjectures that Ferguson was leaving because he felt overlooked as Letterman’s replacement were “horseshit,” Ferguson later told The Daily Beast. “It used to enrage me when I was doing the show that people would assume I was trying to get the 11:30 p.m. show that came on before it…Why the fuck would I want do that?” At any rate, the musical conclusion of Ferguson’s nine-season tenure on December 19, 2014 (read my epitaph) was overshadowed by Colbert’s own musical, star-powered, bipartisan Comedy Central goodbye the previous evening.

Now 54, Ferguson has been involved in several lower-profile TV projects since leaving CBS; his fellow UK import James Corden assumed Ferguson’s Late Late Show duties, and has garnered large audiences and widespread acclaim. Three months before leaving late-night, Ferguson started hosting Celebrity Name Game, where opposing teams of two competed for a $20,000 prize (the syndicated CBS gameshow was conceptualized by Courtney Cox and David Arquette‘s production company). Ferguson won back-to-back Daytime Emmy Awards for “Outstanding Game Show Host,” but the series was cancelled this December. However, that same month NBC announced a Summer 2017 competition special, Top Puppet, a collaboration between Talpa Media (The Voice), The Jim Henson Company, Universal Television Alternative Studios and Ferguson, plus a new release date was unveiled for How to Train Your Dragon 3 (Ferguson plays a Viking warrior named Gobber the Belch). Finally, he took to Twitter to mourn 14-time Late Late Show guest Carrie Fisher thusly: “She was the kindest coolest smartest and most encouraging person I ever met in Hollywood. I adored her. Goodbye Carrie.”

Scotland’s Daily Record reported in March 2015 that Ferguson was at work on an ABC pilot called The King of 7B, where he would star as Prentiss Porter, “an agoraphobic recluse who ventures outside for the first time in 11 years when he spies what could be his soulmate [Two and a Half Men‘s Marin Hinkle] moving into the building across the street.” Re-teaming the writer and director from the Owen Wilson, Jack Black and Steve Martin comedy The Big Year, The King of 7B—what would have been Ferguson’s first regular sitcom gig since his seven seasons on The Drew Carey Show—did not earn a network greenlight (though that spring he did reprise his role as Jane Leeves’s former romantic partner, Simon, on Hot in Cleveland, the TV Land sitcom starring 22-time Late Late Show guest Betty White). Then, in September 2015, The History Channel gave Ferguson a 16-episode order for Join or Die with Craig Ferguson, a show where he welcomed a three-person panel to bestow superlatives such as “History’s Craziest Cult” and “History’s Biggest Badass” to one of six nominees. Twenty-one episodes aired between February and June 2016.

Beginning last month, Ferguson appeared as a talking head on CNN’s eight-part docseries The History of Comedy. He had a huge life milestone to celebrate as well: February 18 marked the married father of two’s 25th anniversary of his sobriety (when Ferguson was 29, on Christmas Day he was en route to commit suicide by jumping off London’s Tower Bridge into the Thames River, but he was sidetracked by a friend who invited him to drink sherry. These events inspired his first book, the novel Between the Bridge and the River). In addition, he debuted a weekday, two-hour SiriusXM radio program, “The Craig Ferguson Show,” on February 27. Until studio cameras confirm otherwise, I’ll imagine him alongside his Late Late Show sidekicks (a gay skeleton named Geoff Peterson, and “Secretariat,” two people in a rinkydink horse costume) deadpanning to America, the place where he so wanted to be.