Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to The Friday Post on Trauma Response! This week I finally caved and bought a subscription to the New York Times (great deal, just a dollar a week) so I finally got to look at the 99% of the content they keep behind a paywall. With that being said, for this week’s Friday post I’ll be talking about “the future of late-night talk shows,” relevant reading is here (if you can get past the paywall), let’s get into it!
As I’ve said what feels like a million times on here: I went to comedy school. Comedy school was a lot like what I imagined going to school to be a geisha is like, except instead of learning how to pour tea just right you learned how to perfectly craft a joke about 9/11. Going into comedy school most people fell into one of two categories, those who wanted to be on late-night or SNL, or those who wanted to become big famous movie stars in Hollywood (it’s kind of crazy how no one wanted to become an unemployed Substack writer, but what do I know?), so there was a lot of talk and a lot of work focused towards late-night comedy writing. I never had a major affinity toward late-night talk shows, besides watching Saturday Night Live most weeks neither of my parents and I sat down at 10 p.m. to watch Jimmy Kimmel or Jimmy Fallon or (god forbid) James Corden crack jokes. Still, some of my contemporaries probably still harbor dreams of writing for late-night, and my blasé attitude towards the genre didn’t stop me from learning all about it in college.
What I’m trying to say is that I know what I’m talking about. What that entire paragraph was trying to say is that, while I may be no expert on late-night, I like to think when it comes to comedy I’m at home. You can trust what I have to say about late-night shows because I have a degree from a probably-soon-to-be-unaccredited liberal arts school that says you can trust me. Hold that knowledge in your mind and know I’m not crazy when I tell you they should just get rid of late-night shows altogether.
I know, probably not the craziest hot take coming from the person who has already professed to not really caring about late-night comedy, but it’s a thought I think a lot of people secretly have and are too afraid to admit. Yes, late-night talk shows are a staple of American television, but as American television has grown and expanded, as the cultural and political landscape has shifted, and as the sheer amount of late-night talk shows has only increased, the essence of late-night talk has remained the same.
The late-night talk show template is a good one: a guy behind a desk telling jokes and doing bits, usually about politics. It’s easy, it’s simple, it’s tried and true. But it’s also stale, especially with, as I said, the sheer number of late-night talk shows on TV right now. During the 2016 Presidential Election, you had four or five different men making more or less the same jokes about the same Donald Trump moments, and that then morphed into four full years of the same thing. And it’s not like there’s a particular diversity of thought between the late-night talk show hosts, they all share the same sensibilities when it comes to what’s right, what’s wrong, who’s good, and who’s bad in the world of American politics. It’s network television, so I understand even if Seth Meyers were some secretly conservative comedian, the network probably wouldn’t allow him to voice that, but, when the entire late-night arena is saying the same thing, it becomes less personal and more like the seagulls from Finding Nemo.
I don’t want to make this an identitarian issue, but it is hard when the stale political commentary is coming from a group of mostly white men (Trevor Noah being the only non-white man, and Samantha Bee being the only woman). Of course, the network gods tried to placate people’s concerns over diversity when they hired YouTuber Lilly Singh to take over the slot held by Last Call with Carson Daly. Lilly Singh is a woman (strike one), South Asian (strike two), and, why this matters I’ll never know, bisexual (strike three, you’re HIRED!), so she’s kind of the complete package the execs were looking for. The problem with Lilly Singh is that she was a YouTuber at heart, and viral success does not a late-night talk show host make. Her show was canceled after two years and the network execs cursed themselves as their shoehorned attempt at diversity crumbled.
There seems to be an inability on the side of the networks to seriously engage with a non-white non-male person as the host of a late-night show. When Craig Ferguson retired from late-night in 2014, people rallied to try and get the network to hire a woman to take his slot. While the idea was briefly toyed with, the end result was pitiful as James Corden (a man with less charisma and humor than a donkey) was chosen instead. None of the big networks want to seriously take the chance with a woman or a person of color that they know people will respond to (that’s why Lilly Singh was hired with no reputable experience), and whenever the smaller or non-networks take a stab at late-night diversity (see: Hasan Minhaj and Michelle Wolf, both on Netflix) they quickly fizzle out. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy and one that no one truly has to reckon with because look, it hasn’t worked in the past *points at A Little Late with Lilly Singh poster in the trash*.
It’s an addiction to the sameness, an addiction to “what’s worked best,” that both helps and hurts the genre. On one hand, it has worked, people understand the format, they trust the format, and they trust the white men that deliver the product to them almost implicitly. On the other hand, it’s tired, in a post-Trump, ultra-politicized world no one wants to keep talking about politics at every turn, it’s getting boring. Nothing new is being done, though there is a variety of late-night talk shows they’re all doing the same bits about the same news items, having the same guests on to play the same games, every night the same show as the night before. There is no innovation in a field that relies on innovation to keep accruing an audience, or even to just keep the existing audience remotely interested.
So I say burn it all down. Let each show fizzle out, don’t hire a new host, sell the cable slot to QVC, and take some time to reflect. The problem with late-night is the inability to think outside the box, to make something new, so once all the late-night shows are gone maybe they’ll have the chance to do just that. I don’t have the exact answers for what to do with late-night, it’s not my job to list specific innovations, it’s just my job to say they need to happen. Hopefully, given enough time, we can resurrect late-night, like a phoenix from the ashes, and it will emerge bigger and better than before, with ideas I wouldn’t have even thought of in a million years. For now, we’ll just have to let Jimmy Fallon laugh maniacally at unsuspecting guests every night until our eyes and ears start to bleed.