Michelle Wolf knows you’re tired. She’s tired, too. She conceived her new series The Break, a half-hour shot live in front of a studio audience and uploaded to Netflix each Sunday instead of in a binge-friendly lump sum, as a reprieve from all of the week’s exhausting bullshit. As she reassures her crowd in the opening monologue, “I’m not gonna try to teach you anything, or discuss political policy with you.” She promises that there will be all manner of jokes and that everyone is a possible target, from her best friend Sarah Sanders to Oprah to Michelle Wolf. In an expertly deployed self-own, she reveals that a clown costume during her childhood did not require use of a silly wig.
She’s not quite Elon Musk boldly repioneering the concept of the subway, but Wolf’s preamble still suggests a different approach to … what, exactly? The show appears to be figuring that out itself, as a production team with a lot of promise presumably carries out some executive’s vague order for a cross between The Daily Show (where Wolf cut her teeth as a writer) and Inside Amy Schumer. From the former, they take the desk-set segment format and the upper-left graphic that goes with it, and from the latter, the stand-up/sketch comedy combo with a feminist bent. While not a disagreeable way to wind down for the evening, Wolf’s pilot episode prophesies a brief period of growing pains in pursuit of an individual identity, and grand dividends once it’s complete.
All of these parts function properly on their own, but coexist a touch awkwardly when bound together by this program. The Schumer-esque material makes good on Wolf’s vow to ditch the political stuff, offering up some inspired absurdity; a faux-trailer for Featuring A Strong Female Lead: The Movie may attain the viral traction it is angling for, and a series of commercials advertising an Amazon Echo that aggressively demands lunchmeat are dementedly brilliant. The contrast is all the harsher, then, when the more classically late-night material goes right into the issues of the day. Wolf takes on the NFL, unloads on Mario Batali with a vitriol that probably wouldn’t have flown on basic cable, and dresses down Sanders over a cynical appropriation of pro-woman ethics. Sanders could very well end up being this show’s greatest asset in the long run, the Bill O’Reilly to Wolf’s Stephen Colbert.
These two discrete halves reach a satisfying dovetail with the final portion, a couch-casual interview with Seth Meyers staff writer Amber Ruffin. What initially appears to be a standard back-and-forth reveals itself to be scripted schtick undergirded by the easy rapport between the two women. This bit in particular posits an exciting path for the show to take, one that could blaze what little fresh territory there’s left to map for late-night cartographers: a deconstruction of the variety talk show schematic more moderate than Eric Andre and more outré than Wolf’s previous gig. Her seclusion on Netflix should be a hint to Wolf that the likes of Meyers, Colbert, Fallon and Corden aren’t her competition, but rather her juicy prize pigs waiting for a good skewering.
It is telling that the segment lending the episode a wisp of cohesion hinges on Wolf’s natural, free-flowing hilarity. Regardless of whether the architecture around her is under construction for the time being, Wolf has arrived to the stage ready for the platform she’s been granted. Wolf is precisely the sort of person that hidebound network types have diligently kept out of the late-night circuit – acerbic, shrill, “niche” (a codeword for “too weird”), a woman. Wolf knows full well that these are all key components of her winning comic persona, and weaves them together into a performance several shades more interesting than the collection of interchangeable crash-test dummies currently peopling American late-night. It’s not just that she’s telling more vicious jokes, it’s that she sinks her incisors into every punch line for maximum damage.
Which is to say Wolf has certainly earned any leeway she and her crew need to get their footing. If Netflix’s unsettling mission to dominate every avenue of modern entertainment results in a talent as singular as Wolf getting a handsomely budgeted playpen to indulge her weirder comedic urges, that’s by no means the worst thing in the world. Months after Netflix announced their deal and weeks before her first recording, Wolf demonstrated that she can whip up and control a national controversy with her lacerating speech at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, a moment that catapulted her to an unanticipated echelon of national fame. She makes what could have been a victory lap into an encouraging dash out of the gate.
- The Break with Michelle Wolf is available on Netflix on Sundays
