Late night TV really went downhill after Jack Paar left the air.
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Seems like they took all the good things in the daily show and spread them over several shows and none of them had enough to fill a whole show by themselves.
Wilmore is intermittently funny. Consistently funny is what’s needed to sustain that show. They should have chosen someone else. Misfire.
Oh, god, no. Seriously, Comedy Central, 11:30 weekdays isn’t the slot you’re gonna crush in when Steven Colbert’s already got a late night gig. Larry’s show was solid and provided a unique perspective that quite frankly, needed to be available.
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Pity; I found Wilmore’s show to be far more entertaining and thought provoking than Noah’s. I’ll miss it.
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I found him to be consistently funny.
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I wonder, if the target was young males… were even young black males watching it in significant numbers?
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Agreed. I rarely watch the Daily Show now, but would switch over from Conan to catch the Nightly Show.
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Mike Yard was the standout on that show - in addition to Larry. I hope that Mike ends up on the air somewhere else. Maybe he could be a Daily Show correspondent.
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Businesses don’t continue to carry products that just sit on the shelves. Krogers wouldn’t sell a raw barley, turnip and fig energy bar even if consuming them did miraculously raise your sensitivities to the plight of racial minorities.
I used to watch the Wilmore show – did from the beginning and slogged through several more months groaning. I appreciated Wilmore’s smart commentary – and he is much more relevant than Noah (who they should have canned a long time ago), but the supporting crew and skits were flat. I stuck with the show for longer than I enjoyed, hoping it would improve. However, as the primary dragged on through the late spring, they finally lost me. Wilmore’s HRC smearing and Bernie worship was the last straw, so I removed the show from my recording line up. Obviously we are not the only household who tuned out. I can’t watch Colbert’s show anymore either – the show is cringeworthy. I catch the relevant political clips on-line instead. However, I never miss John Oliver and Samantha Bee.
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Better time slot? The slot after TDS is golden – a built in audience if Stewart had remained and Noah had been up to the job.
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John Oliver could muster respectable ratings reading the ingredients off the back of a cereal box. Now that I think about it, maybe he’s actually done even that.
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Too bad. Wilmore should have gotten TDS, has has been pointed out.
As it was, too many cast members. Should have abandonded the rount-table format for one-on-one interviews with interesting guests. Strange that they never fixed a format that wasn’t working.
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Too bad there weren’t more like you.
I complain about Maher all the time – he really can be such an infuriating asshole, but I still never miss the show. We were all spoiled having the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert one two punch available to us for so many years. So miss them. Colbert is not Colbert anymore – even when he tries to resurrect him, he still seems neutered.
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No, they don’t, but let’s face it: 11:30pm on basic cable needs a really amazing talent to be competitive against the broadcast networks’ late night shows that have had years - in some cases, decades to build up brand loyalty among their viewers. Colbert could do that - especially w/Stewart as a lead-in. Whatever terrible ‘let’s appeal the already oversaturated idiot tosh.0 crowd’ idea CC puts in next still won’t compete when the 11:30 timeslot when Colbert is still on the air. Sure, he’s a more normal, tame, and less outrageous Colbert-for-Network-TV now, but he’s still got a fair chunk of his own ‘brand loyalty’ in addition to Letterman’s legacy watchers.
So no, businesses don’t continue to carry products that just sit on the shelves, but nothing CC puts on in that timeslot will give them back the Colbert Report numbers. That was lightning in a bottle, all nine years of it, and by the time it was done, the ‘young men’ of the 18-24 demo who got hooked by it were already moving through (or out of) latter half of the 25-34 demo. So saying ‘hey, we’re gonna pin expectations on the younger demo here!’ was ridiculous to begin with.
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He’s a very funny guy, though not sure if I would use “genius”. The problem is that hosting a show is more then just being funny. The format just did not work.
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The round table discussions were clearly the weakest part of the show. For every rare interesting guest that made for lively conversations, there were too many rapper/comedian panels that slowly killed the show over time.
Funny how my lasting memory of this show will turn out to be Alex Wagner leaving in the middle of a show since she couldn’t handle all the prison rape jokes that were made during a panel discussion.
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That’s the influence of the larger machinery - broadcast TV, all the network censors watching over things, and the pressure of ‘this is The Late Show, not your little basic cable show, Steven. Don’t alienate people’ - at work. Which is sad, because if they’d just let him cut loose, I think he could be even better than he was on The Colbert Report.
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