After a year-and-a-half of finding the humor in some of the bleakest moments in American race relations in decades, Comedy Central is ending Larry Wilmore’s The Nightly Show. I hesitate to call a satirical half-hour talk show a “grand experiment”, but it was as close as one can get because the overriding topic of conversation was almost always race – a subject Americans aren’t always excited to discuss frankly.
Even if the network stressed that the show would have mass appeal, the very fact that black and brown faces dominated the program both in front of and behind the camera necessitated discussions of race, far more than on any other late-night talk show. As such, the format of The Nightly Show did not lend itself to the cocktail party vibe of the biggest late-night franchises: The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and The Late Late Show with James Corden. A light-hearted, carpool karaoke-esque segment would jar viewers next to a conversation about the trials of the police officers involved in the death of Freddie Gray or the attacks on cops in Dallas. A Hollywood Reporter piece on the cancellation pointed to Wilmore’s de-emphasizing of so-called “viral hits”. “It’s not designed to have the type of things that [Jimmy] Fallon and [James] Corden do, like the [carpool] karaoke type of thing or lip sync battle and those types of things because those are such pure comic things,” Wilmore had told the Reporter.
It’s peculiar that there would even be a question as to whether The Nightly Show would attempt to engage in that world. Its lead-in was The Daily Show, the doyenne of modern televised American satire. The Daily Show directly birthed The Nightly Show (and before that, The Colbert Report); plus, the stars of HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, TBS’s Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert are all Daily Show alums. The viral success of those shows usually comes down to the timeliness and passion of the host’s monologues or a clever remote piece.
The Nightly Show shined the brightest with its panel – a healthy mix of media personalities, such as MTV News’s Ana Marie Cox and New York magazine’s Rembert Browne, and minority comedians including Mike Yard and Grace Parra. At times, it felt like the vital conversations on black and feminist Twitter finally had a safe home on TV. Those conversations could be funny, but they were also vital. In the aftermath of the cancellation, one must ask if there’s still a home for satire from a minority perspective on television.
Michael Che still holds his seat on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update and Trevor Noah’s hosting of the Daily Show is an important step in the right direction, which Comedy Central president Kent Alterman pointed out in his statement on the cancellation decision. But SNL can’t go into the depth that The Nightly Show could, with a full half-hour devoted to racial issues, and Trevor Noah’s experience as a South African is different from Wilmore’s as an African American. This is not to say that Noah can’t speak on American race issues, but the scars of our particular brand of racism are unique.
There’s hope in the form of shows like NBC’s sitcom The Carmichael Show and Adult Swim’s The Eric Andre Show. Both programs look at race in different ways – Jerrod Carmichael’s series uses the classic family comedy template inherited from 1970s Norman Lear shows like All in the Family and The Jeffersons to tweak American race relations. Andre is far more surreal and casts a sideways glance at prejudice – smashing his way through his point rather than batting it around gently.
The medium of the late-night talk show offers so much to the conversation on race, though. Having a Last Week Tonight or Full Frontal devoted to these issues is needed at a time when there’s still so much resistance to even talking about racism from people like Donald Trump and his cronies. Even with the end of The Nightly Show and black comics such as W Kamau Bell and Hannibal Burress struggling to keep their shows on the air, there’s ample talent waiting in the wings, both as hosts and writers. Minorities and allies need to support these shows when they deserve it. Seek out comics like Solomon Georgio, Travon Free and The Nightly Show alum Franchesca Ramsey. Give us the opportunity and we will seize it.
