This Sunday, millions of people in the U.S. and around the world tuned in to watch the annual Super Bowl. Each year, a large percentage of the viewers watch just to see the often clever and funny commercials. On his special post-Super Bowl edition of The Late Show, Stephen Colbert featured a commercial for an unlikely business: indie bookseller Foggy Pine Books in Boone, N.C. Colbert explained, “Big companies aren’t the ones that need our support the most right now. It’s small businesses that have been hurt the most in this pandemic. Of course a small business could never afford the millions of dollars it would cost to produce and run an ad on CBS tonight, which is why we here The Late Show have decided to just pick one and just give it to them.”
The commercial, which opens with a skydiver plummeting from a plane, features Sam Elliott, who narrates (“every book is an adventure waiting to happen”), and “satisfied customer” Tom Hanks (“Foggy Pine Books has the best selection in all of Boone. They have books on all of my interests, such as World War II, and also books about the events from 1939-45”)