Can Justin Trudeau's Stephen Colbert appearance win over voters?

Yesterday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau embraced a time-honoured tradition in the city that never sleeps: appearing on late-night TV.

He stopped by The Late Show with Stephen Colbert to talk about everything from rising xenophobia in Canada to which Star Wars film is the best. But will the interview do anything to help with his popularity, either at home or abroad?

Today on Commotion, investigative journalist Justin Ling and culture writer Amil Niazi join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to unpack the segment's best moments, where it fell flat, and why it might not have been the TV spot that the Liberal Party was hoping for.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Listen, this is a pop culture show. We leave the politics for the other guys. They're more than qualified to do so. But on this show, the thing that I'm most interested to understand is the way that the prime minister uses pop culture as a tool, because that's the business of this show. So with that in mind, Justin Ling, you fired up Colbert to watch the prime minister there. How was it?

Justin: It was sort of two different interviews. The first half was like, I was sitting on my sofa cringing so hard I thought I was going to pull a muscle. It was really difficult to get through. And then in the second half the prime minister basically turns to doing a campaign ad, and he's clearly more prepared for that. He gets tee'd up to talk about being a teacher and liking Star Wars, which is like his whole personality. And so it was much more comfortable towards the back end.

But the whole thing was tough because it's very clear that the prime minister wants to go back to that time when he was kind of a political meme. The trouble with memes is that they have a very short shelf life, and trying to revive a meme from 10 years ago is just inviting a really awkward, fake nostalgia. And this just reeks of that. I can see why they did it, but … it definitely feels over the top, and trying to make us pine for 2015.

Elamin: The idea that he's trying to turn himself specifically back into that meme is interesting. I want to stay with that for a moment because obviously memes are also how you quantify the reaction to an interview like this. Justin, when you look at the reaction, I don't imagine it's what the Liberals were hoping for in terms of Trudeau being received as a meme or sort of the whole interview being distilled as a meme.

Justin: I think the prime minister's office is still very much thinking about things like this in terms of who's watching it and who watches after the fact. But of course, we know that culture is rarely consumed by primary sources anymore. It's all secondary clips, memes and reactions to. I don't think we'll know what the real reaction is going to be to it for the next 24 to 48 hours. But I will be curious to see what gets clipped and what doesn't, because more people are going to watch the clips of it than the original interview itself.

There is this point where he's talking about leading, and being prime minister, and being a politician, and he sort of does this aside, and he's been doing this for a while now: "I like to think I'm pretty good at it." And I guarantee you somebody — Pierre Poilievre's team, the Conservatives, some right-wing meme account — is going to pull that out, splice up a bunch of footage talking about high inflation and food bank lines and how bad everything's going, and then it'll be the prime minister going, "And I think I'm pretty good at it." So this sort of thing is just fodder for the secondary culture war, meme-knife fight that takes place after the fact.

Elamin: I like that Justin Ling is designing memes on the fly.

Amil: Someone's like, "OK, noted. I'm going to make that up right now."

Elamin: Amil, I'm interested in the way that Trudeau uses pop culture specifically because it used to be a comfortable arena for him. He used to be received with a bit of ease in that space. Watching that yesterday, was that ease there, do you think?

Amil: First of all, I didn't think it was as bad as Justin did. I didn't think it was that cringey or that horrible. I thought as far as politician interviews on late-night TV go, it was somewhere firmly in the middle. He was kind of awkward, certainly with the off-the-cuff jokes and ribbing. He was a different version of him than we're probably used to, but I didn't think it was that bad.

I feel that he probably did assume it would be received much more differently because he is so used to using pop culture and being lauded in pop culture. That's his safe space. That's where he can go to feel like, "Maybe I'm getting booed at appearances, on the street, but when I'm on TV, that's where I shine." It seemed much more measured than past appearances that we've seen for sure.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jess Low.