The Colbert Report (2005)

Stephen Colbert spent nine years on Comedy Central playing a blustering conservative cable news pundit drawn largely from Bill O'Reilly, and the joke was never just the opinions. It was the format: the self-regard, the catchphrase segments, the certainty that feeling something was as good as knowing it. A spin-off of The Daily Show, it ran from 2005 to its final episode on 18 December 2014, 1,447 episodes in all. The specific news has dated, so dip into the segments that parody the machinery of opinion television rather than the week's stories; those are the ones that still describe what is on the news channels now.