It wasn’t hard for Larry Wilmore, formerly a colleague of Jon Stewart on "The Daily Show," to get studio audiences to cheer for “The Nightly Show.”
But it was far more difficult to get actual TV viewers to tune in to the Comedy Central program, and after a year-and-a-half on the air, “The Nightly Show” has been canceled by the cable network. Wilmore's final show will be Aug. 18.
Daniel Fienberg is a TV critic at The Hollywood Reporter, and he joined Frame host John Horn to talk about the various aspects of "The Nightly Show" that made it unique in late-night — and which might have also been responsible for its undoing.
Interview Highlights:
Should the decision to cancel "The Nightly Show" come as a surprise to people?
I think the writing had been on the wall to some degree. If "The Nightly Show" had gotten an Emmy nomination or two, that might have helped; if the show had gotten any sort of bump at all from when Larry hosted the White House Correspondents' Dinner, that would have helped; I think if the convention season had given the show any sort of bump at all, that would have helped.
So at a certain point, the ratings were just very low and it was already a very difficult job, following up "The Colbert Report." Unfortunately, the numbers weren't there and the social media buzz wasn't there, and if you don't have those things, what do you have?
I want to talk more about the social media buzz, because "The Nightly Show" was well-regarded by critics, but the show did not do something that other late-night shows have been doing — using little bits of content as short segments on YouTube. It seems like that was something Larry Wilmore wasn't really interested in.
I don't know that he was necessarily ignoring it, but I think that it was a difficult road to travel. He started off at the beginning of the show with a very popular "Keeping it 100" segment, and after a while a lot of those segments started going online-only as exclusives. The hope was that that would be a viral touchstone for the show, and that didn't come together.
I guess it's just that he was covering a lot of stuff that maybe some of the other shows weren't covering, and that maybe people just weren't excited to share. And that's too bad, because more and more and more, late night has become about, Are you going to be passing around the clips the next day? And I felt like there was a lot of really good stuff that Larry and his team were doing on "The Nightly Show" that people just weren't passing around the next morning.
The format of the show was a little more talky, it wasn't skit-heavy — it involved some engagement and some conversation. Is that something that, as a format, might be a problem going forward with other networks, as they contemplate what the lessons might be of "The Nightly Show" not working?
Unfortunately, the show tried to be distinctive with the [final] segment panel discussion, and unfortunately that was never a strong suit for the show. That was what they wanted to do, and they just never figured out how to do it well.
Basically, it was a conversation with correspondents and whatever guest they were able to cobble together on any given night. The two correspondents would sit there and try to be funny, because they wanted to get more screen time in the future, and they'd more often than not take the spotlight away from the guest.
That's not ideally the way a panel segment's supposed to work, so that's the problem with trying to do something a little bit different — if you don't nail it, sometimes that looks bad.
The other thing that Larry Wilmore did is he populated his show with a lot of people who are not typically well-represented on television. In a statement he released today, he said: "I'm also saddened and surprised we won't be covering this crazy election or 'The Unblackening,' as we've coined it. And keeping it 100, I guess I hadn't counted on The Unblackening happening to my time slot as well." The Chris Hardwick game show "@Midnight" is taking his slot. Is there a bigger story here about the representation of people of color in late-night?
I think that's a big conversation that needs to continue. It certainly has been when Comedy Central, with Trevor Noah and Larry Wilmore, has been the only place for minority representation for late-night television for basically the duration of that block.
But yeah, having Chris Hardwick go into that 11:30 slot to replace Larry Wilmore, it looks bad. There's no way around it, even if it's just entirely temporary. Short-term, going from Larry Wilmore, who has such a distinctive, specific, angry, edgy voice at times, to Chris Hardwick, who is pretty much the epitome of a certain kind of white-bread, frat-boy humor, it's not ideal. I wish that Comedy Central had some alternative for how they were going to make this transition look.