Thoughts on the End of the 'Nightly Show' with Larry Wilmore

When a television program ends, fans can’t help but feel as if someone close to them died. Our most beloved presidents could not have asked for a better send off than Jon Stewart and ‘the character’ of Stephen Colbert received on their finales. It’s a bit overlooked, to say the least, that, as Stewart himself said, “When you're not on television, you're still alive, and you're still engaged in the world.” Obviously this has to do with how beloved these hosts became over the run of their shows, but is not necessarily related to the substance of their humor. Once they became inseparably associated with a particular line of truth-telling, their delivery, the timbre of their voice, their mere presence on screen retained viewers as much as the hypocrisies they exposed. 

I can’t help but think that the cancellation of The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore had something to do with the cult of personality television relies on and its limitations on politically ambitious television. Indeed, Comedy Central’s myopic president Kent Alderman made clear that he is not interested in this sort of television not just in his unfortunate statement that the show hadn’t “resonated,” but in the decision to cancel it outright without trying to make it work with Trevor Noah’s Daily Show or break down why he felt it wasn’t finding an audience. In his statement, he gave the show’s lack of traction on social media equal weight with its low ratings (it averaged about 600,000 viewers, down from about 800,000 when Stewart’s Daily Show was the lead in). But this is disingenuous as Wilmore made clear early on that the show was not meant to be digestible in that way. It did not seek to create viral clips like ‘Carpool Karaoke,’ which seems closer to what Comedy Central wants. Rather it sought to create a home for voices and arguments that are underrepresented in the media landscape while exposing the hypocrisies and misrepresentations practiced in the mainstream media. That is, after all, the reason why it was Jon Stewart who developed the conceit for the show and pitched it to Larry Wilmore. 

And from the ground up this is what it sought to accomplish. It’s voice built on the moral indignation of Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, but was not meant to simply provide mindless release for frustrated liberals a la Aaron Sorkin. It stayed dedicated to its argument regardless of who it offended, which tended to include those in power across ideology. (At the White House Correspondent’s Dinner, MSNBC was likely blindsided by Wilmore’s jab at their string of firings of black newscasters). It attacked Fox News for its sad, stubborn need to deny racism exists at all in America, such as one classic segment on Bill O’Reilly’s use of an all-white panel for a discussion of racism. It exposed themes in CNN’s denigration of young black men, such as showcasing their mug shots next to polished photos of the officers who killed them, and the repeated point that the killed man “did have a criminal record” as if that made him somehow deserving of his fate. In a segment called “Hang On a Minute, News!” it took a story that every outlet reported as the integration of two public schools in Mississippi and pointed out that the schools were in fact racially integrated, but the majority-black school had such low resources that a federal court had to absorb it into the greater-resourced majority-white school. The show found humorous ways to discuss issues that are typically ignored, such as food deserts, and reached out to people who normally are not given a platform - Wilmore was the media’s sole member to speak with gang members in Baltimore after they declared a truce in an effort to bring an end to the city’s riots. It also offered unique context for major news of the day: in the aftermath of the AME Church shooting in South Carolina, when people were debating whether the confederate flag had racist connotations and should be taken down, Wilmore pointed out that in parts of Europe that ban public display of the swastika, neo-Nazis use the confederate flag as a substitute: “It’s such a racist symbol that it does double duty as the backup racist symbol for another racist symbol!” 

Many people were shaken after the AME Church shooting and moved when Jon Stewart simply spoke to people’s feelings in an honest way instead of doing a regular show. As a sickening amount of black people were murdered by police in the following year, Wilmore found a formula that, yes, began with jokes but built into a simple articulation of core truth that provided much-needed catharsis in a media landscape based on false equivalencies. He provided, in his own way, what people were getting from Jon Stewart but within the confines of a more specific argument. That is why the post-Jon Stewart melancholy that has hung over Comedy Central’s late night landscape is so unfortunate because it shows a deep lack in audience reflection over just what they loved about Stewart and Colbert. Had it been the substance of their programs rather than just an animal yearning for their TV fathers, they would have found what they were looking for in The Nightly Show. 

This is in no way meant to slight Stewart’s contribution as, essentially, the creator of this genre of TV satire. Indeed, he largely did this by stewarding voices other than his own. Very few Daily Show contributors in his last couple of years as host were far beyond their early thirties and many were in their twenties. However, once a show has aired its creators have little control over how the audience dissects it. Comedy Central’s viewers seem to have prioritized their love for Stewart over the substance of his program.

Granted, it takes time for a show to penetrate in this way and I have little doubt that the Nightly Show would have with time. After all, Stewart didn’t really find his stride as host until the lead-up to the Iraq war, by which point the show had been on for about four years. Still, in the last week of the Nightly Show one couldn’t help but note how uncentered around Wilmore the show seemed to be. It was a reminder that it was not so much his show as an ensemble effort of which he was the face. In service of the argument the show sought to make, he not only hired cast members typically unrepresented in late night - of the eight black women writers in all of late night, three worked for the Nightly Show, including Robin Thede, making her the first black-female head writer for a late night comedy show -  but he largely hired unknown performers who had built up social media followings around politically driven humor. In other words, he prioritized their ability to deliver the show’s brand of comedy over their name recognition. This all demonstrates that the show’s infrastructure was not meant to be a vehicle for Wilmore but to be a space for unheard conversations.

And those conversations don’t end just as, despite what the logic of TV seems to suggest, Larry won’t go away, even though the show was cancelled. This is especially true in the context of Wilmore’s long career. He is on par with Norman Lear as one of television’s great forward thinkers. Both have strived to use television to get people to have conversations they wouldn’t otherwise have and to represent people more authentically to how they actually live. Starting off as a stand up comedian in the 1980s, Wilmore recognized that Hollywood wouldn’t consider him a sufficiently “urban” black comic to put him in front of the camera. So he worked his way onto the writing staff of shows like In Living Color, the Jamie Foxx Show, and the PJs until his conviction that the industry would catch up to his kind of humor paid off. More importantly, in those early days people also spoke of ‘the Cosby effect,’ the alleged phenomenon that viewers of The Cosby Show became more tolerant of black people because they saw them as no different than anyone else. Wilmore saw that this wasn’t so. As he put it, The Cosby Show was not so much about a black family as it was about “a family that happened to be black.” From the programs he worked on in the nineties through his creation of The Bernie Mac Show, for which he won an Emmy and a Peabody, to serving as executive producer of Black-ish, Wilmore consistently worked to find ways to show black Americans on mainstream television unapologetically as they are and did not try, as Cosby did, to make them more palatable to white people. Long before the Nightly Show Larry Wilmore worked to bring stories to the mainstream regardless of who they made uncomfortable in the name of truthfully representing the underrepresented. There is little reason to think he won’t continue to do so.

But those of us who, trapped by television’s logic, are still in mourning, can find assurance in Wilmore’s closing words of the Nightly Show’s finale: 

As a culture, we’ve all agreed with the opinion that the world should be seen in a certain way. So at the ‘Nightly Show’ our chief mission was to disagree with that premise and to see the world in a way that may not make everybody comfortable and to present it with a cast of people who don’t always get to have a voice in it. On that front, I feel that we’ve been very successful and I couldn’t be prouder of what we accomplished…Of course it’s the last episode and I’ve gotta keep it a hundred. So I’ll just say this: I’m not done yet.