R.I.P. The Nightly Show
By Dan Selcke
Comedy Central has cancelled The Nightly Show. We look back at the show, its legacy, and Larry Wilmore’s place in latenight TV.
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The Nightly Show is over. It finished strong, but the wound is still fresh, particularly since it happened right as we’re gearing up for what’s guaranteed to be a bombastic election season. Larry Wilmore, who made a big splash with his cutting monologue during the 2016 White House Correspondents’ Dinner, would have been welcome.
Comedy Central president Kent Alterman frames the cancellation as a business decision. “We’ve been monitoring it closely for a year and a half now and we haven’t seen the signs we need in ratings or in consumption on digital platforms,” he said, citing its failure to resonate with young men as a particular sore spot. “We’ve been hoping it would grow.”
He’s not wrong that. The Nightly Show underperformed in the ratings. In its final year on the air, The Colbert Report averaged 1.7 million viewers. The Nightly Show, which took over Stephen Colbert’s time slot after he left for his CBS gig, averaged 776,000 in the last few months. That’s in contrast to what’s happening at Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show, where ratings among men 18-24 are growing. On that count, Alterman “couldn’t be happier.”
It’s hard to argue too hard with those figures—at the end of the day, TV executives will follow the numbers. The question is whether this could have been avoided. Could Wilmore have raised his ratings to a corporately palatable level without losing his unique voice? What, in short, killed The Nightly Show?
Photo Credit: Comedy Central/Screengrab
The explanations have been coming in. Over at Vox, Caroline Framke suspects that the show’s lack of viral-ready content is to blame. The analytical Wilmore never had, and likely never sought, a Carpool Karaoke-like sharable sensation. But then again, fans are lapping up John Oliver’s deep dives into politics over on Last Week Tonight. There may be more to it.
Josh Koblin of The New York Times suggests that Wilmore’s willingness to engage in “prolonged stretches without a single joke” turned off audiences. But on the other hand, Framke’s colleague Alex Abad-Santos explained that he stopped watching the show because its regular roundtables emphasized jokes over content. Was there no way for The Nightly Show to win?
It may just come down to too many shows and not enough time. Between the exits of David Letterman and Jon Stewart, the additions of Samantha Bee and James Corden, and the reshuffling of Colbert, the latenight field underwent seismic shifts in the last two years. The TV faithful have more options than ever before, but their time is limited. It was too much to hope that all the newcomers would survive.
Photo Credit: Comedy Central/Screengrab
Still, it sucks that Wilmore had to be the one to go. For one thing, it means we lose one of the few people of color working as a frontman in latenight (not to mention one who employed a diverse set of writers). With Trevor Noah and Samantha Bee now in the mix, that world is less homogenous than it was two years ago, before the great shake-up. But it’s to everyone’s advantage to keep latenight diverse. That way, every voice can be heard and no comic stone left unturned.
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In the final analysis, it’s Wilmore’s individual voice—singular and insightful—that will be missed the most. He was avuncular yet edgy, smart but not smarmy, and passionate about politics, the media, and race relations. And of course, he was very, very funny. That was worth seeing nightly.